How to stop operating theatres from wasting two hours each day

What does a good use of a hospital theatre look like? We don’t want surgeons and their teams to work all hours, or stay behind late to get through more work? But nor do we want to see hospital…

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The Influences That Childhood Has Had On My Career Path

I was born in late 1994. I have and have always had a love and affinity for technology. On some level I have always had a fascination with computers; not so much with the programming side of them so much as the visual, interactive side.

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My first literacies in technology come from before my own memories. According to my mom, I knew how to operate the VCR when I was 2 years old. According to my grandmother, my mom was nearly driven to hysterics by the endless loop of Winnie the Pooh, a story that my mom denies, or at least says was exaggerated.

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My first memories of computers come from my grandparents house. My grandfather was an employee at America Online at the time. He had all sorts of interesting gadgets that I found moderately, but not especially, interesting as a young child. He had more than one computer tower, one of which I was allowed to use. It ran a shiny new copy of Windows ’98 and had access to this mysterious thing called “The World Wide Web”. My grandfather attempted to teach me about how to access the “web”. It involved a complicated mess of typing out the ENTIRETY of a web address, “http://www.” and everything. Gah! Who designed this weird ‘keyboard’ thing!? All the letters are out of order!

One day, tiny me was watching a VHS tape of Dora the Explorer at their house. Nickelodeon had a shiny toy that they, in their typical style on any directly sold Nickelodeon video product, advertised loudly; nick.com.

I realized that “Hey… I recognize that weird triangle that chooses which way that Dora and Boots should go or what they should do. I wonder…”.

I went over to the ‘computer’ thingy, and opened Internet Explorer. I typed the scribble from a sticky note plus the address I wanted to go to into the box with the blinky line; “h t t p : / / w w w . n i c k . c o m” and hit return.

The dial-up modem started making its dial-up modem noise. Slowly, a web page appeared before my eyes in all of its 1990s glory. I managed to make my way over to the Dora the Explorer section. I clicked on what was there and…

…quickly discovered the limitations of 1990s internet.

Fifteen years later I walk upstairs to find my little brother playing interactive episodes of Dora the Explorer on 2010’s nick.com. I still carry some bitterness about that to this day.

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For my thirteenth birthday, I managed to convince my grandfather that a laptop would be useful for school, though he correctly assumed that I wanted it for games. My family only had one computer at the time; a Windows XP tower.

This new computer was mine and it had a shiny new operating system on it; Windows Vista. Oooooh. You can see through the window edges.

This computer proved to be a bit of a potato, but it got many jobs done. I didn’t really start learning how to use it until high school though. In 2009, Facebook started becoming a big deal, and, in a bout of irony, it taught me a skill that my much younger brother knows pretty well already at age 11; how to type.

Now, hear me out. I had of course done plenty of typing already. I’d written essays and done basic tasks on my computer and my family’s computer plenty before now. Facebook had something different, though. Facebook had an instant messenger. It was far from being the first in existence, but it was the first that I used heavily. It gave me the incentive to type better and faster, and to constantly practice. Education had made attempts at this but, let’s be honest, typing classes made it difficult to see a future with keyboards beyond data entry. Facebook was cool, and it introduced most of the modern social networking crowd, myself included, to the scene.

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My uncle is an interesting dude. I can say without lying or exaggerating that he quit his job at NASA twice. He’s a talented programmer with a strong interest in robotics. He has tried to share this knowledge with me on several occasions, but I’ve never quite been able to wrap my brain around the code side of things.

For Christmas, he would often gift robotics related things, like a VEX robotics kit or an OOPic chip — his own invention akin to the Arduino. He frequently gifted parts compatible with these as well, such as a sonar range-finder.

The sonar range-finder was actually part of a larger project initially. Over the week that he was in town, he and I put together a setup that would trigger a rubber band gun if it detected something too close to the sensor.

I was big into airsoft at the time, and this gave me an idea. I had a couple of very cheap automatic airsoft pistols that ran using AA batteries. The trigger was literally just a switch with some trigger-shaped plastic on it. If the switch was pressed, it would complete a circuit and the guns would fire.

I managed to modify the guns so that both sides of said switches had wires attached that led outside of their casings. Using a relay, I created a setup with which the OOPic could activate the trigger circuit on command. I got the sonar sensor plugged in and voila. It worked. One automatic airsoft sentry turret.

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2010. Sophomore year of high school.

Google had been promoting SketchUp, touting it as free for non-business users. I took a look.

SketchUp is a primitive 3D modeling software, used in business primarily by people dealing with architecture or city planning. It’s user interface is simple, easy to understand, and easy to get into. I spent some time on it, seeing what I could make. I made a tank.

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2011. Junior Year.

A good friend of mine had started attending a 3D Animation class at a vocational school. Thanks to a state-funded program, students from around the general area can attend said school for free in concurrent enrollment with their high school. It even has free transport to and from both schools.

At around the same time, I began having an interest in photo manipulation. I had discovered GIMP, a free software akin to Photoshop. It was klunky, but it was able to do way, way more than I was used to in most 2D image programs that I had seen, MS Paint especially.

Said friend was learning Photoshop in the 3D animation class. This piqued my interest. I had been having a lot of fun with GIMP, and was seriously considering a career using Photoshop.

Within a few months, I had applied to attend the school. There was an interview process to get through. The school only had so many seats, so they wanted to sift between the people who were there to learn and the people who were just there to escape high school. I told the interviewer about my liking GIMP and wanting to learn Photoshop, messing with Google SketchUP, and creating the airsoft sentry turret. They seemed impressed. At the start of my senior year I was admitted into 3D Animation and Visual Effects class.

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Vocational school is the best decision I have ever made in my life.

I breezed through Photoshop, gaining certifications for it within a couple months. I moved into 2D animation, then general 3D with a leaning toward 3D modeling.

After I graduated high school, I began a Web Design class alongside 3D. I learned HTML and CSS, and learned about different code editors and how to use the Terminal in UNIX-based operating systems (like Macintosh). I learned that web sites are literally just files that the user is remotely accessing and downloading on the fly, and that internet browsers are effectively just fancy versions of the Mac Finder or the Windows Explorer.

3D is my true passion though. I spent three years in that class. Not because I had to, but because I could. I left with certifications in Adobe Photoshop, visual effects, and 3D modeling.

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Okay? So how does all of this correlate together?

I’ll stop boring you with my anecdotes. My point is that I am now on a career path toward 3D Animation, Modeling, and/or Visual Effects both 2D and 3D. My life has been leading me to this point, and, had it not been for a few key events, I would not be here now taking college classes for something that I am legitimately passionate about.

Taking a more in-depth look at this with our metaphorical Media And Learning googles, lets take a look at my learning ecology — the correlation and relationships between these events and how they got me here.

Most everything I’ve mentioned here has been a “new literacy”; a means to a skill that was not realistically possible to develop until recently, especially for children. Most of those are simultaneously “media literacies”; new literacies that teach skills about and via media devices.

While I was a child, I had the means to watch and listen to video and audio media and had the means to access the internet. I could do both of these without help from a very young age. As I got a bit older, I had tools that I could build robots with and better access to computers that I used for everything from typing documents to web browsing to gaming. Soon after that, I learned how to access free tools that allowed me to go much farther with digital creation than had been possible before. Finally, I got proper training in legitimate professional software, used by real industry experts to make the content that until recently seemed completely out of reach.

The technology and means to do any of these things were being continuously developed as I grew up. Most of it didn’t exist until well after I was born.

The people in my life have had as much influence as the new technology. Discourses — conversations— with my parents, family, friends, and educators have all been important in my development.

The people mentioned in my anecdotes have played many key roles in my life. My grandfather helped to spark my interest in computers by introducing me to them while I was still very young, even before they were popular in most households. He later got me a computer that I could call my own, through which I better learned how to deal with things like software installation and PC maintenance. My uncle introduced me to more advanced concepts, like programming and robotics, and helped me get a deeper understanding of both. My friend helped me understand the programs offered at the vocational school and got me interested enough to go. Finally, my mom provided council, and cheered me on as I progressed.

My vocational school provided something unique that was rare in a standard education. It provided an environment full of people that had similar interests to my own, and where we could all learn alongside each other cooperatively — a participatory culture. It would even go so far as to put us in teams for a major project that we would enter into a competition against other schools from around the state and around the country. The members of one of those teams are still good friends with me today.

How to stop operating theatres from wasting two hours each day

The Influences That Childhood Has Had On My Career Path

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