What I've learned from Shodor At Shodor I am an “Apprentern” which is an intern and an apprentice. At Shodor I have learned many useful skills. These acquisitions that I have made over the 3 years I have been affiliated with Shodor include business and ethical skills. Which can only be learned by experience and hands on training , two things that Shodor makes highest priority. Not only does Shodor provide valuable experience, but also teach you the basic and advanced skills needed to have a successful career in computational science. One thing that I really appreciate about Shodor is the fact that they give you a feel for a variety of computer skill sets that allow you to get a feel for what fields you like the most. As an apprentice Shodor requires that you be present at classes the first three Saturdays on each month. In those classes this year I have learned AgentSheets, Vensim, Perl, Netlogo, and Web Design. AgentSheets is a revolutionary tool that lets you create your own agent-based games and simulations and publish them on the Web through a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface. Learning AgentSheets did not just teach us just that specific program, but introduced me to agent Modeling. We used AgentSheets with biology making Predator Prey models. Vensim is used for constructing models of business, scientific, environmental, and social systems. Vensim showed us how we can use computers to model not just the cardinal sciences but also the social sciences such as economics and Mathematics. Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular amongst programmers. Perl taught me not just that programming language but helped with the logic of most programming languages. Using Perl we teamed up and made a prime number generator. In Web Development which taught us how to construct a website from the ground up with no prior knowledge of html of CSS. The instructor first taught us Html which stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. Html is the foundation of a website which you build upon. Html give the basic layout of the website it controls how many columns you want in your site or what words you are going to have in your divisions. CSS controls the color, size, margin, positioning, fonts, and etc on your website. We also learned JavaScript which is JavaScript is an object-oriented scripting language used to enable programmatic access to computational objects within a host environment. Although also used in other applications, it is primarily used in the form of client-side JavaScript, implemented as part of a web browser, providing enhanced user interfaces and dynamic websites. In that Series of Wed Design classes we also learned Inkscape. Inkscape is a vector graphics editor application. It is distributed under a free software license, the GNU GPL. Its stated goal is to become a powerful graphics tool while being fully compliant with the XML, SVG, and CSS standards. Jared Rozenek
