I101 Unit 1 Assignment

I had a great freshman year at IU where I could take almost any class and enjoy it, unlike high school where you had to take the exact same curriculum as your peers. After wrapping up my first year of college, one class especially stood out from many good courses that not only grabbed my attention but let my personality flourish, I101. I enrolled in this class because I’ve been interested in computers and technology from a young age. Little did I know, the course not only encompassed my fascination of computers, but dove into ethics and implications, subjects that I read about regularly and let me solve problems scientifically in a way that uniquely suited me. I enjoyed my time in the class learning topics such as python and databases. There
I started as everyone else did, “Hello World”. For my entire academic career, I have always been looking for the most efficient way to complete a task. In high school, it would obliterate my enthusiasm when I had to complete history book problem sets. The teacher would always give 20 questions, say which chapters the answers are within, and set us loose. I thought to myself “I should not be doing this; this is a waste of my time”. I longed for our textbooks and assignments to go online so that I could just use the find function to instantly find the answers and fill in the assignment. No one read the chapters to learn the content, therefore everyone’s time was wasted. Thinking like this led me to fill out online worksheets and assignments incredibly efficiently. For example, I would open a word document, write my name, class, and date. I would then copy that to multiple documents so that I could save a few seconds each time I started a document. It wasn’t until learning python that I experienced a whole new world of possibilities to make my life easier. Even starting by printing concatenated strings was interesting. From there I could foresee the possibilities that python could bring. After getting into more complicated problems with python, I felt able to tackle some of my own problems, not just made up ones the teacher assigned. I made an easy to use financial calculator program that could find future values, present values, interest rates,
As we learned in lecture, technology just means something that is scientifically used for personal betterment. Although we mostly dealt with Information Technology in this course, technology is everywhere. People have been using technology for centuries, even the basic wheel is an example of technology. As long as people have been using technology for the good of their peers, others have used it to benefit themselves at the cost of their peers. Paul Marks of New Scientist shines light on the first recorded hacking, in 1903 a magician and inventor interfered with Guglielmo Marconi’s early wireless telegraphy to display mean messages in Morse code. While in the Technoethics lecture, Logan opened my eyes to the masses of people trying to disturb others for their own personal gain. I can understand how a few people in the shady ends of the internet are trying to steal from others, but not how these scammers are everywhere on the internet preying on those who don’t know any better. It is unsettling to think about the population of people who aren’t overly knowledgeable about the internet who are blindly walking into traps left and right. An example is when Logan talked about phishing and how realistic some scamming attempts look. There are a few emails currently in my inbox that smell a little fishy, but I am relatively well versed on the internet. I am usually able to pick out scams on the internet. My Grandparents though, due to the nature of