Month: May 2020

Our group intend to design a course to teach French because French is the second offical language in Canada and it is spoken in many other regions. As for the methods, our group members have different perspective. I choose direct instruction to teach French. I am a Chinese student who has been learning English since primary school, and I believe that French is quite similar to English. Direct instruction is where teachers use explicit teaching techniques to teach a specific skill to their students. This type of instruction is teacher-directed, where a teacher typically stands at the front of a room and presents information.(from google) As a result, I has learned English for almost 15 years through direct instruction and I find it effective. Also, I had ever been an English TA before and have some teaching experience, I believe that every language consists of two parts: grammar and vocabulary. Learning a new language can be dull sometimes, as both learning grammar and memorizing words are dull. The best way to learn grammar is to be taught by a teacher. It is very hard to figure out the rules of the language on your own. As for the vocabulary, you can memorize it by yourself, and the teacher can tell you how to use it. Similar to learning English, learning French can be divided into many stages. During each stage, you need to achieve a goal. First of all, you need to learn some basic words and the grammar. Grammar is the rule of the language; when you figure out the rule, you just need to put the words into the right place of a sentence. Then, you can do some simple practice about listening, reading, and speaking, to enhance the feeling of the language. At the same time, you need to memorize some new words everyday. When you have enough words in your mind, you can try to do more difficult practices and even use the language in real life such as watching a movie in French, listening to French songs, reading French newspapers and articles. Sounds interesting, hahahaha. That is my opinion about the way to learn French.

When I was young, I played computer games very often. One day, I surfed the internet and found that some players were editing the games. I thought it was awesome because when you have the ability to edit or design a game, you will be the one who creates the rule rather than the one who obey the rule. Editing the game is not easy for me as I was young and had little knowledge about the computer. Still, I tried my best to read the method they used to change the data of the game. Then, I downloaded a software and used it to open the data of the game. Suddenly, many “0” and “1” appeared, that was how the computer stored the data of the game. For the next few days, I spent a great amount of time trying to figure out the meaning of the specific number in the specific position. It was dull and time-consuming, but I really enjoyed it and didn’t feel tired at all. I got very strong motivation–to be the designer of the games. Finally, I successfully changed some basic parameters of the game. Later, I found something even more attractive that someone could change the model and effects of the game! It was amazing. However, to achieve that, I need to learn more. Therefore, when I was in middle school, I started to learn something about programming and I joined the programming competition class. The process of learning is boring because you have to face with the code all the time. But to me, the code seems to have magic. When you  master all kinds of computer languages such as java, python, C++ and so on, you can use  them to direct the computer to finish all kinds of tasks. Also, you can design a game on your own.

These are links to my peers’ stories:

yiwei

xinxinwu

yiyan

I am junhaolin，a first year student in computer science. I am from Guangdong，China.