Online games have revealed their importance during the COVID-19 pandemic as a tool to create laughter and memories in the absence of real life get-togethers. Through my virtual engineering design team socials and friend group gatherings, I’ve experimented with a few online games that are worth trying, and I wanted to share them in a listicle for those that have a bit less time to search for games. Most of these are free, and all of them quick and easy to set up. Enjoy!
1. Skribbl.io/Sketchful.io
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An opinion, of course
On August 27th, 2020, a Reddit user by the name of u/MaGuishi posted a clip of two players interacting in Mediatonic’s 2020 smash hit video game, Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout. If you haven’t seen the clip, here it is:
I’m of the opinion that this clip is one of the best clips, if not the best clip, of 2020. In it, we see a pink character struggling to climb up a ledge in a section of the game, and another character, the first person player, helping them learn how to climb up.
At first, the pink…
Good practices for COVID-era learning, from a student’s perspective
Online learning during COVID-19 has been a unique experience to say the least. Everything from homework, to examinations, to office hours have changed dramatically to accomodate the pandemic, and with these changes comes a feeling of what has worked and what hasn’t. As part of the younger subset of Medium authors, I’m in a position to provide some insight to how learning has adapted. Obviously, I can’t speak for everyone, but these are my experiences as a Canadian university student. I’ll start with smaller topics and build up to larger ones.
Problem solving with CERN’s analysis language in C++
Written in April of 2020.
ROOT is a data analysis language created by CERN that is used by many research scientists across the world. Although it is very powerful and multipurpose, many of its users will agree that ROOT has a bit of a learning curve.
In this article, I document the learning process that I went through to write my first complete C++ macro and the solutions to errors that I came across. I write these troubleshooting articles not only for the benefit of others with the same issues, but also so that future-me can remember the basics. …
How an application made for gaming is breaking learning barriers
In 2014, Derek Muller, better known as Youtube creator Veritasium, released a video titled “This Will Revolutionize Education”. In this video, he didn’t reveal some fancy technology that would revolutionize education. Instead, he explained how, despite the invention of revolutionary technology like motion pictures, the radio, the television and computers, technology has failed again and again to replace teachers. I’m not bold enough to make the same claim that education is being revolutionized, but learning barriers are being broken in a way like never before by a single application.
The application that I’m talking about is the popular communication app…
With many of the mysteries of particle physics being solved, a peculiar question is left open: can a particle be its own antiparticle? Many underground experiments are working to answer this question about our universe
As a student research assistant at SNOLAB, a Canadian facility that hosts and spearheads sub-atomic physics experiments, I learn every day about the phenomena being explored in the physics world. I’m going to talk about one such phenomenon, neutrinoless double beta decay, in a way that is hopefully easy to understand.
A brief refresher and primer
Everything we can touch is matter. Matter is made up of constituents called atoms. Atoms consist of a dense and small center called the nucleus, which contains protons and neutrons. Protons are positively charged particles, neutrons are uncharged particles. …
Skribbl.io is a notoriously funny online game where you earn points by either guessing what others draw, or having people guess what you draw. Naturally, drawing with a mouse or track-pad leads to terrible, convoluted drawings, so if you’re playing with friends and you’re all in a call together, lots of fun can be had. Although the emphasis of playing skribbl is having fun, playing well and besting your friends is a very rewarding experience. Here are my tips and strategies to do just that. In each section, I have some general principles, followed by specific techniques.
Table of contents:
Very little content on the internet is as notoriously roundabout as recipes. Nonetheless, Youtube tutorials come pretty close : a minute of intro, a minute of outro, a sponsorship message. Most of the time, all you’re looking for could be explained within 30 seconds, which leads to frustration. Just imagine it: you’re sitting down with a cup of coffee on a Sunday night and — just kidding. Here are the tips:
Disclaimer: I’m using Creative Cloud 2019 on Windows. I’m not confident these are the best ways to achieve these goals but they have worked well for me. …
On the day that I started writing this, live reports were coming out about the Iranian bombing of Iraq military bases. The memers were all over World War 3, but for the most part, I’m still not convinced that a war is going to happen. However, in case we enter nuclear winter soon and you’re reading this from Low Earth orbit on a 6 petabyte snapshot of Archive.org, I want to share the things that I find beautiful in this world. If you’re not reading this during the apocalypse, I hope you enjoy my insight anyway. …
Kevin Lin
Engineering Physics student, environmentalist, Youtube content creator.
