That is a really tough question to pick a “first”.
I’ve always wanted to learn about nature thanks to my Opa and Father. They would take me and my little brother for walks in the woods when I was kid in Germany and my Opa would tell us all the woodland lore he knew. Things like what mushrooms are best to eat or are poisonous. What plants and animals lived here or there. Later on my Dad continued this alone when we moved to the US. Later still TV shows like Sr. David Attenborough’s “Life of Earth”, Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” and Jacques Cousteau’s “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau” showed me one could study things like this and present them formally. I wanted to be like Sir David or the Cousteaus, going off into the world and investigating all these amazing things. Sadly now I sit behind a computer most of the time =:<
*sniff*
So … the "what" would be a desire to know why nature behaves like it does but as to a "first" or "when" well that is hard to tell.
I did not set out to be a computer scientist. Here is how I ended up becoming a university professor and computer games researcher.
I played some video games when I was growing up, but I was not especially into games. My first computer was a ZX Spectrum http://goo.gl/feic4 You could program it using BASIC. We would type in pages and pages of programming code from magazines to play very simple games.
I studied Computer Science because I thought it would be fun. I never thought I’d work with computers for a living (Important life lesson: Do what you love!) After university, I thought I would study some more to be a teacher at university. Turns out you need a PhD and need to do a whole bunch of research to become a university professors, but I figured working with computers was fun, so I did that. I was not working in the area of games at this time. My research area was called “artificial intelligence”.
After I moved to Australia, I was looking for a more applied area for my research and I thought making the NPCs (non-playing characters) intelligent would be a good contribution. This is how I started working on games. There were very few people doing research on games in 1998, so I got to know almost all the people working in that area. These days there are hundreds and hundreds of researchers trying to make better games, so there are lots of new ideas every day.
It started with a series of magazines that I collected that were all about dinosaurs when I was six. Each week I would go to the newsagent and get my next copy, which featured a new dinosaur! I loved those magazines. I was similar to Dirk – my father played a big role in fostering my love of science as did scientists like David Attenborough and Carl Sagan; seeing them on TV and reading their books really inspired me to question my surrounds and explore. And my schoolteachers were a big inspiration – my science teachers were always lots of fun and did interesting experiments so we could always see the practical side of what we were learning.
For me it is related to that moment when one of my lecturers actually related what up until that point had been rather boring information to something that I could see as being truly amazing. How can it be that for each of our cells, we carry around 10 bacterial cells… which we cannot see. I was curioius to know what they were all doing and why some were harmful and some were not. I also read lots of journal articles and science magazines, which made me curious to learn more.
I didn’t realise that I could actually have a job as a real scientist until I got to university. Before that, science was something that I liked and found interesting but I didn’t really know how I could actually BE a scientist.
I was very inspired by one of the professors at my university who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2005. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall He swallowed a bug which he thought caused stomach ulcers when everyone else thought they were caused by stress. He gave himself an ulcer, but proved himself right in the process! A very brave and inspiring story I think.
That is a really tough question to pick a “first”.
I’ve always wanted to learn about nature thanks to my Opa and Father. They would take me and my little brother for walks in the woods when I was kid in Germany and my Opa would tell us all the woodland lore he knew. Things like what mushrooms are best to eat or are poisonous. What plants and animals lived here or there. Later on my Dad continued this alone when we moved to the US. Later still TV shows like Sr. David Attenborough’s “Life of Earth”, Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” and Jacques Cousteau’s “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau” showed me one could study things like this and present them formally. I wanted to be like Sir David or the Cousteaus, going off into the world and investigating all these amazing things. Sadly now I sit behind a computer most of the time =:<
*sniff*
So … the "what" would be a desire to know why nature behaves like it does but as to a "first" or "when" well that is hard to tell.
1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Attenborough
2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan
3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacque_Cousteau
0
I did not set out to be a computer scientist. Here is how I ended up becoming a university professor and computer games researcher.
I played some video games when I was growing up, but I was not especially into games. My first computer was a ZX Spectrum http://goo.gl/feic4 You could program it using BASIC. We would type in pages and pages of programming code from magazines to play very simple games.
I studied Computer Science because I thought it would be fun. I never thought I’d work with computers for a living (Important life lesson: Do what you love!) After university, I thought I would study some more to be a teacher at university. Turns out you need a PhD and need to do a whole bunch of research to become a university professors, but I figured working with computers was fun, so I did that. I was not working in the area of games at this time. My research area was called “artificial intelligence”.
After I moved to Australia, I was looking for a more applied area for my research and I thought making the NPCs (non-playing characters) intelligent would be a good contribution. This is how I started working on games. There were very few people doing research on games in 1998, so I got to know almost all the people working in that area. These days there are hundreds and hundreds of researchers trying to make better games, so there are lots of new ideas every day.
🙂
1
It started with a series of magazines that I collected that were all about dinosaurs when I was six. Each week I would go to the newsagent and get my next copy, which featured a new dinosaur! I loved those magazines. I was similar to Dirk – my father played a big role in fostering my love of science as did scientists like David Attenborough and Carl Sagan; seeing them on TV and reading their books really inspired me to question my surrounds and explore. And my schoolteachers were a big inspiration – my science teachers were always lots of fun and did interesting experiments so we could always see the practical side of what we were learning.
0
For me it is related to that moment when one of my lecturers actually related what up until that point had been rather boring information to something that I could see as being truly amazing. How can it be that for each of our cells, we carry around 10 bacterial cells… which we cannot see. I was curioius to know what they were all doing and why some were harmful and some were not. I also read lots of journal articles and science magazines, which made me curious to learn more.
0
I didn’t realise that I could actually have a job as a real scientist until I got to university. Before that, science was something that I liked and found interesting but I didn’t really know how I could actually BE a scientist.
I was very inspired by one of the professors at my university who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2005. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall He swallowed a bug which he thought caused stomach ulcers when everyone else thought they were caused by stress. He gave himself an ulcer, but proved himself right in the process! A very brave and inspiring story I think.
0