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Edit 14/03/2017: I’ve added the block contents of the two modules in another post, so you can finally compare which concepts you do or don’t have.

The question of which maths module to take is one that comes up a fair bit for students of the Open University, especially in STEM degrees.  It comes up so often, in fact, that the OU has a site devoted to the question.  For most people, this will mean choosing between MU123 (Discovering Mathematics) and the more difficult MST124 (Essential Mathematics I).

For some degrees, such as Maths, Physics, or Engineering degrees, the question is merely one of where you should start, as you’ll likely need to take and pass MST124 anyway at some point along your path. But for other degrees, you’re simply required to take a maths class, and which of the two you choose is completely up to you, with no effect on your degree or its classification.

As they’re Stage 1 modules, your pass level won’t affect classification. However, MU123 has a basic pass/fail structure, while MST124 allows the awarding of a distinction. I wouldn’t think this at all important, but someone pointed out that if they apply for a job while still on the degree course, it might be nice to say they passed all Stage 1 modules with a distinction.

I’ve mentioned earlier that I’m A) an immigrant, and B) a drop-out, so that makes deciding which maths to go into more difficult.  I was in advanced maths when I dropped out of high school early.  This would have meant I finished with the same amount of maths as non-advanced maths, but still beyond the compulsory amount required for all students. But I also skipped a year of maths before that, and had to self-teach some. So I’m left trying to match that up with “GCSE Maths” and “A-Level Maths” without anybody realising that the curriculum changes from time to time.  It would be so much easier if they simply said which mathematical concepts you needed to be familiar and comfortable with.

When I took the practice quizzes at the above mentioned site, I breezed through the MU123 quiz. When I took the MST124 quiz, I did alright through the first half of the questions, but it was taking me forever to remember formulas and rules I haven’t used in twenty years.  And the questions just felt tedious.  And I figured I just didn’t need that in my life.  So I didn’t even complete it.

Since it doesn’t make a difference to my degree, and it will be easier for me to get through and not burn me out, I was all set to simply take MU123 next year and never look back.  Working in the industry for as long as I have, I’m fairly certain it won’t ever come up in my job.

That was, however, before I encountered the Hitbox.

On a great series of MOOCs that I’m doing, I’m currently coding some graphics programmes. In all of the practice programmes we’re assigned so far, it asks us to only concern ourselves with the center point of the image, and pretend that if the image wanders halfway off the side of the screen, that’s still within the boundary of the screen.

I wanted to do it a little more advanced.  For instance, if the image is approaching the edge of a screen at a right angle, it can get as close as 1/2 the image size distance between the center-point and the screen boundary.  Easy enough to code that

But what if it’s approaching the boundary at an angle?  Now the corner of my image is further in the X or Y coordinate than half the image height or width.  How do I figure that out?

Well, it’s simple trigonometry.  As I mentioned the other week, I was self-taught in trig until last month, so I got a close look at a practical issue to see how well I understood it.  Here’s how I sketched out my problem:

hitbox-problem

 

It’s clear to see that the closest I can get to the top edge on the Y axis is going to be the distance between the center of my image and the corner of the image (also calculated using simple trigonometry) multiplied by the cosine of the indicated angle.  Cosine(y) = Adjacent Y/Hypotenuse Y, so Hypotenuse Y * Cosine(y) = Adjacent Y.  Similarly, I need that same hypotenuse (all corners will be the same distance away from the center in a square or rectangular image) multiplied by Cosine(x) to determine how close I can get along the X axis.

So that’s all pretty basic-level maths.  But it’s a very basic hitbox, too.  What if I don’t want to pretend my images are rectangles?  What if I’m having a scalene triangle interact with an irregular pentagon?  (Adding a third dimension isn’t really all that different, you just have to increase the number of checks that are made and the calculations that represent edges.)

It’s still not that difficult to calculate hitboxes, as it becomes a series of intercepting slopes being greater than or less than line segment points.  But the hitbox is just one tiny thing to calculate. And already my shortcomings in maths could have hampered a solution if I hadn’t prepared myself.

So I think I’m now edging toward MST124. To be clear, I don’t plan to go into programming, and though I’d love a proper Computer Science degree, this is as close as the Open University gets.  But I would like to have as many bases covered as possible, and not regret that I should have had more maths under my belt when I come across something I hadn’t considered in the future.  Besides, I did go back and finish the MST124 Are You Ready quiz, and it agrees that it’s a decent fit.

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I’ve basically said why I’m getting a degree, and why I’m getting it from the Open University. So then why a degree in computing when I’m already a network engineer?

The last time I was looking down this path, before the company I was working for went bust and before my wife became pregnant with our second son, I was asked this question outright by a coworker. He had a degree in history from Ireland, and more than ten years later he was a mid-level engineer for a cloud services company. (Though due to the company falling apart, he was trained up quickly and was helping me do senior level work.) His argument was that I was paying money to study, and could get any education I wanted with that money, but using it to get a degree that people normally use to work for someone at my position was throwing the money away on a piece of paper. Or maybe parchment. Probably paper, though. Like, fake age-yellowed paper.  Fake age, not fake paper.  Because fake paper would be parchment, again.

It’s a fair question. With the whole of the Open University course list in front of me, I could pick out anything I want to study, and go down that path. I could learn history, myself. Business administration, psychology, law, and anything else are all possibilities, and I could just pick the most interesting one.

Except I have already picked the most interesting one.  I picked it twenty years ago. I like computers. I love networking. I like the career, the people, the fact that every year there’s more things for me to learn. I love that no matter what organisation I’m with, I can use my skills to invent a solution to something that’s keeping someone from being satisfied with their job.

What would I do if I got a history degree? I’d still be working in IT. I don’t think there are any IT Historian positions that need filling. You know what I’d be doing with a history degree? The same thing my coworker is doing with his: Letting it sit on the wall and ignoring it while I worked in IT.

In the meantime, it’s not like I’m even close to knowing everything about computing. When I started at the school I work in now, there was a student intern who taught me things about PHP that I now use every single week. He had no degree or work experience, and I learned real world job skills that I’ve constantly used for the year and a half since from him.

Think how much more I’ll use after a current higher education degree course? In a field I already know that I love, have experience in, know I can find work in and will enjoy? Surely that’s worth a few quid here or there.

Also, let’s be honest, I’m already a full-time dad and a full-time employee.  I’m also a part-time semi-professional geocacher and drinker. These things take dedication. To say nothing of all the time I spend avoiding work on the allotment.

Getting a degree in my current field will certainly optimise the time I can devote to study. I know it won’t be easy, but it will certainly be easier than, say, an accounting degree would be, unless I were an accounting clerk.

As an example, I’m going to have a large leg-up on things like coming up with assessment project ideas. I even have a potential idea for my final project of the degree already, integrating our school’s student management system with an open source VLE to give teachers the option of using the VLE without any setup work on their behalf. (I’ll probably end up doing this in a year or two anyway, so I’m not worried if someone swipes this idea. I’ll come up with a thousand more ideas between now and then.) And certainly the CCNA module will be easier for someone who can already figure out networking subnets in his head.

If I can shave off a few minutes here or there because I’m already scripting solutions, and spend them with my kids, and still get a degree, that’s worth it.

And finally, it’s going to give me the chance to explore other parts of Computing & IT than my current little kingdom. I’ve already decided to switch my degree focus from networking to web development. Currently a lot of the solutions I’m providing to the school are bespoke web applications, and I’m really enjoying it.  Before my previous employer imploded, I was starting to design a new cloud services platform. This degree will let me convince future employers to let me keep playing with these technologies, which I love.  I almost wish I could just take forever and take all the modules.  (Considering how often they have to retire modules due to the speed of change in the industry, that’s potentially literally impossible.)

So that’s why. Oh, and I’ve always, always wanted a degree in computing.  Maybe I could have just left it at that.

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This is  a record of my journey from start-to-finish in obtaining my BSc (Hons) Computing & IT degree from Open University. I thought it’d be nice to start with how I ended up on this path. Time will tell how far along it I manage to go.

I dropped out of a US high school in the middle of the 11th grade.  That’s a year and a half before graduation for those outside the US.  (Compulsory education laws can vary state-to-state, and are subject to religious freedoms.  Typically, however, it lasts until 16 years of age, even though secondary education lasts to the year students turn 18.)  It’s difficult to discuss, but the short version was that I was depressed.

My next educational stop was admittance to the ‘local’ community college.  (Again, there’s a cultural divide in describing the US education system to some others. An American community college is a public institution of higher education which mainly grants two-year degrees called associate’s degrees, which are primarily a foundation to a four-year bachelor’s degree at a university. They also tend to offer a limited number of bachelor’s degree programmes like universities, or adult education programmes for obtaining diplomas or continuing/further education.) College was great for me emotionally. However, in addition to being expensive, it was also about forty minutes away by car. When I lost my transport, my commute became two 90 minute bus journeys every day, often for a single 30 minute lecture.  It ground me down to the point that I eventually quit that, too, and I entered employment.

My first job was as telephone support for an online service in the days before the World Wide Web. It was a good education in data communications and paid good money, especially for a drop-out.

This led to my next educational stop: distance learning to go back and get my diploma. I was able to do so in short order whilst working, but I despised distance learning at the time. I would buy, collect, or be sent materials, get a sheet of paper telling me what I had to learn, then I showed up for an exam. It was dehumanising, but I was successful.

I thought that was going to be the end of my education. I couldn’t make enough money and have enough time to attend university classes, and I certainly wasn’t going to go back to distance learning.

By 2012 I was married, living in Southern California, and in a great career as a network engineer. I investigated the possibility of distance learning, and found that the Internet had really revolutionised it. It was attractive enough that I thought I’d give it a go again.  I researched my options, and found the programme I wanted to follow.  It was a few months before I finalised my enrolment. (These British spellings are killing me.)

I had been enrolled for all of about a week when our lives were forced to change.  The immigration laws for the UK were being changed rapidly. Soon, it would be a requirement for my wife to be living in the UK and making around £20,000/year for six months before I could move there.  If we left immediately, however, we could use our current earnings as an indication of our earning potential in the UK to prove we wouldn’t need to go on benefits, and we could move together without being separated.  I had promised my British wife that we would move to the UK before we had children old enough to go to school, so we had no choice but to pack up our lives, withdraw from University, and move to a different continent.

A few years later our son did start school, and I finally had time to enroll at university again. This time I was excited to find Open University. Much more discussion is included in subsequent posts, but the short version is that it’s perfect for my life.  My career was already well established over here, even if I was working about 65 hours a week.  I was sure I could talk them into giving me a break for study time.

Between the time I contacted Open University and the time they called me back, my company went out of business.  And didn’t pay me for my last two months of work, taking £6000 of my money with them. At Christmas.

I found employment again quickly, but my path back to education was blocked again, just as quickly.  This time by good news, though; my wife was pregnant with our second son.

He’s still a baby, but we’ve managed to schedule our lives in such a way that I have enough time to finally study a degree at Open University.  Time to give it another go.

As I already know what I want to do with my life, I’m going to get a degree in my current field. I’m studying for the BSc (Hons) Computing and IT (Q62) degree from Open University. Another entry probably holds more details on why.

I suppose the one thing still missing from this entry is why it’s important.  It’s not.  At least not objectively.  I have a great job, make good money, have a home in a great location, am blessed with a truly special family I love to bits … Getting a degree isn’t going to make my life any better. It’s just something that’s of great importance to me personally. Part of it is being an example to my children. Part of it is out of respect to my dad. It’s something that’s been left undone, though. Like my diploma, it’s something I need to go back and finish.