July 13, 2016

Group 2

Alicia Au

Sharon Lau

Ingrid Luk

Doris Wong

Natalie Yeung

Our day began with the first lesson being Creative Writing. We began by writing a short story on one of the ten given topics. In groups of 3, we were asked to identify the plot, setting, characters, and the context among our stories. The professor also explained the Iceberg Theory according to which “If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”   According to the instructor, there should be a subtext in every good story. Subsequently, we were given a short story written by John Cheever. The story was about a son and father reunion after a very long time, highlighting the distant relationship between the father and son. After going through the story, the professor asked us to identify the situations, stories and the subtext of the piece. Later, we were given 2 bars of chocolate each and we had to write a poem praising one bar by comparing it with the other. We had a lot of fun letting our creative juices flow. To finish our class, we studied the passage ‘Hills Like White Elephants’. It was composed of dialogues between a man and a woman. We spent a great morning writing creative stories.

In the afternoon, we went on a much-anticipated academic field trip to SILICON VALLEY. Our first stop was the Computer History Museum. With exhibits on a single level of a large building, we were amazed by the hundreds of computers through various decades.  The museum offered us a great deal of information. The largest exhibit in the museum named 'revolution' told us the early years of computer history. Things as simple as the Chinese abacus to those as impressive as the first ever robot 'Shakey' are all well displayed and described.  We were absolutely amazed by how generations before us had created something as complicated and useful as a computer. There was also an exhibit about self-driving cars and how they can alleviate the number of accidents on the road. We were particularly impressed by the IBM 1401 Demo lab where a team of former IBM engineers were working on restoring a computer from the ‘60s to work. It was amazing that they could still be so passionate about something so old and we could see that they really loved what they do. Although we didn’t see the type of sleek, fast and powerful devices we use today, it was still pretty impressive to learn about how we ended up here today.