Yeah, finally I’ve finished my senior paper and handed it in today. So what’s all the fuss about senior papers anyway?
Here in Germany you have to write a senior paper in the last grade before A-levels in one of your two main courses. It has to be similar to a scientific paper about a topic you and your teacher choose. Typically it’s about 10 pages long but most often it seems to take about 20 pages.
It’s probably the longest non-coding project I’ve ever done and I really hope it’ll stay this way for some time since I’m not thrilled by the thought of doing anything like it again (at least for the next 3 to 5 years). The same applies to all my classmates, although its probably the longest project they’ve ever done for them. Everyone has been writing and printing and correcting and printing again constantly for the last 2 to 3 weeks and this has literally been crunch mode for most of us.
I’m actually even feeling a bit burned-out because of it since I’ve been spending most of my vacation working on it instead of relaxing and now after one day of school I again feel ready for some real vacation..
Anyway, I’ve uploaded my senior paper and you can find it here. However, currently there exists only a German version of it, so if you don’t understand German it will be of little use for you. I’ll try to create an English version of it with LaTeX when I find some free time but I can’t promise anything.
The sources to it are released under the “GNU Free Documentation License” and can be downloaded here.
The senior paper is about “creating graphical simulations with a pc” and describes some of the techniques required to create a raytracer. (The German title is “Modellierung graphischer Simulationen am PC”.)
Stay tuned for some more coding-related entries soon but I’m still busy with another school project so it make take a while before I’m back to normal.
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