I’m going to try and write a description of each day’s happenings and publish it at the end of the camp on the way to the airport to meet my parents in Colorado for a family vacation.
6.28.09: We arrived around 45 mins early but still managed to catch the camp directors coming out to setup the welcoming table for the three overnight campers. We (campers and 6 staff members) played frisbee for awhile before touring downstairs a bit, gorging on pizza and playing some Unreal Tournament, one of the best games ever. Then we went upstairs to play 1000 blank cards. This game involves passing out 5 cards to each player, and creating a draw and discard pile, with the blank cards making up the draw pile. Each player takes a turn playing the various cards in their hand, 1 per turn unless the card states otherwise. As someone takes a turn, keeping the count in their hand at 5, everyone else is drawing on the blank cards. For example, a insane squirrel card could be made and played against someone which would then cause them to lose 5 health and 1,000 dignity. These points or items given by cards are totally abaritrary and are marked down on a score card. The objective of the game is determined by the players. For example, the highest point score wins. It’s usually better not to make this into a win/lose game though due to the random cards that can be made. This game finished up our night around 11 and I got to sleep around 11:45.
6.29.09: I believe I forgot to mention our staff’s nicknames are Captain, Shep, Flipflop, Skipper, and Zulu. Those are the staff most actively involved. We started the day with breakfast, for which we are allowed to spend $6. Lunch and dinner are allowed $8 and $9, respectively. This is to prevent overages at the end of the week. Breakfast was an egg an
That's Captain looking at me and Scott's the one on the right going for the frisbee
d cheese croissant with an orange juice. Lunch a slice of pizza, coke, and cookie. Dinner- salad, green beans, cranberry juice, and yogurt. My instructor for programming was Skipper who did a relatively good teaching job but poor in comparison to the other instructors if you ask me. Our class was interrupted a few different times with breaks for an Armagetron tournament. We finished up the day with another spot of Unreal and Dungeons and Dragons, which I’ve never played before and is surprisingly fun. It’s all about the DM, and Flipflop was definitely a good one. It’s now pretty late and now that I’m caught up on the past 2 days, I’m going to bed.
*bottom two entries written on 7.2.09 due to an error involving the iPhone Wordpress app*
6.30.09: iD Tech apparently has weekly Unreal tournaments that they have Teen students compete in, and the top two students move on to the regional competition. The prize for the regional win involves “the respect and admiration of your peers” as Flipflop so elegantly stated. Since my phone deleted this day, I really can’t remember what happened too well since it’s summer and everything effectively blends together.
7.1.09: Evening activities included more D&D in which everyone (Captain, Scott and Andrew, my roommates) battled a giant dragon named “T’date” (standing for That Dragon At The End). The entrance of the dungeon had the phrase “T’odwad’ate”, or something of the like. That stood for “That One Dungeon With A Dragon At The End.” It’s really amazing how much time can be burned playing D&D. Once a good DM is procured (I’d say Flipflop met the challenge), the players can really get into the story and it’s extremely easy to spend at least 4 hours sitting around a table listening to epic battles involving acidic blobs of Jello, which was one of the enemies Scott inevitably got stuck in. I also spent a large quantity of time viciously mocking things with my Bard abilities, including a goblin that ran away from us after a rather large battle. I threw it down a toilet and viciously mocked it as the DM, Flipflop, described its big eyes staring up at me. I’ve gotta say, that’s probably the only time anyone has ever felt sorry for a goblin in D&D. Even Captain felt sorry for the creature.
7.2.09: A massive plate of eggs for $1 started off the day, amongst conversations of epic D&D battles, of course, and of course entering of massive amounts of My Coke Reward codes from the various Minute Maid bottles the cafeteria of Wash U sells. I’ve probably gained 3 free cokes just from entering the codes from the extended day group (which includes Jack only), my roommates, and the staff. I’ve been bugging Captain about the pool for long enough that eventually we did go for about 15 minutes while the normal campers checked out. We headed back to the dorms and showered before heading to dinner. I brought back a cookie which came in very handy for eating purposes after a succesfull Warfare match on Unreal. I believe my fellow campers are now in the neighboring basement room playing a bit of Guitar Hero on the camp’s PS2 which we only just now broke out. This is the first real chance I’ve gotten to use a computer to type an entry, as iD pretty much packs every second of camp with something. We now have free time to finish up projects as the staff is debugging and burning CDs for the camper’s projects. Today was the last day of Unreal tournaments, as tomorrow will bring water fights and no evening free time as I’ll be on a plane (I can’t say boat, as that’d be camp inappropriate – one of the younger campers thought he’d include the uncensored version of the song on his website – bad idea). I’ve never been to an overnight camp before, but as far as camps go, I’d say this one was pretty impressive. I don’t know how much C++ I learned, but C++ isn’t really something you can learn in a week. At least I have a base understanding of it now. Everything we wrote was run in Command Prompt style, as a GUI takes more time and skill to code, but I’m told adding one should be fairly straightforward.
7.3.09: Family Showcase, as it was named, was the main heilight of today, although I was the only one without a family to show my project to. I was awarded a diploma and a cd containing my project as part of their ceremony. We also all did shoutouts, as we did all other evenings before checkout, so students could acknolodge things staff members and other students had done for them throughout the day. Afterwords, they released everyone and I ran up to the cafeteria to empty my card and my two roommates’ of leftover money. I ended up with a salad, 2 giant slices of pizza, 4 cookies, a rice krispy bar, and an apple which ended up to be about $15-$20. I took all my stuff back to the dorm, took advantage of their fancy foot bath in the basement, and said goodbye to all the awesome staff before hopping on the metro. I bought a one way ticket and had to switch lines and go the other way to get to the airport. It made me a bit worried but no one was even checking the tickets. I ended up having to wait in the airport for 2 hours before the flight which I spent drawing my name on the carpeted wall while I was waiting and attempting to talk to people over the announcements reminding people not to detonate bombs, etc inside the airport. Them then announced we were going to have a one hour delay so I returned to my relaxation post where I met Sierra who was also on my flight. So we kept ourselves company for awhile while we waited. Her brother called though and the delay was lifted. The flight was pretty fun since I took advantage of their $6 Directv service by paying the cool guy sitting next to me for swiping his card. I met my parents, and ended up with a $120 hotel for $80 after a bit of bartering by my mom. I’m now sitting at Whole Foods in Boulder on the 4th and think I’ll publish now. Hope I didn’t bore you too much. 
Check out the awesome iD website
Photos of the entire week on Flickr
Tags: c++, camp, class, command prompt, gui, id, missouri, mo, st louis, washington university
