Before I explain more about my journey to a growth mindset, I would like to talk a little bit about a project that I have been working on for a few days now. Animation projects have always been an interest of mine and I decided to implement my coding skills into a project that would simulate a hobby of mine, cubing.
A rubik's cube is a challenging puzzle that not only provides a mental stimulus when solving, but is visually appealing as well. For my project, I set the goal to develop a self-solving rubik's cube that could be scrambled in any set number of steps and then be solved by applying a reversal algorithm. I understand that applying a reversal algorithm is not the most conventional way to solve a rubik's cube, however, the point of this project was to understand how to develop my GUI skills in Java.
I implemented the functionality of the code in Java on an IDE known as Processing, which is an open source graphical library built for electronic art and visual design projects. With this IDE, I was able to spend approximately 14 - 16 hours watching tutorials and assembling the back end of my application. Processing is a very useful tool as it has many in-built functions that I was able to use when developing the framework of the GUI and implementing the rotation functionality.
Major challenges I faced when working on this project include understanding the algorithm concept of translation and rotation as the proofs were heavily based on linear algebra concepts, which I had to spend sometime brushing up on. Luckily, the tutorials I viewed provided a through analysis of the proofs and provided me with the ability to establish fully functional rotations. As a result of my hard work, I successfully implemented the project which can be seen in my YouTube video:
My favorite part of this project was viewing the simulation come to life and work when I implemented the proper functionality to the cube. I look forward to working with more simulation designs and programs.
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