Craft Thoughts

 Information Systems students at BYU have the opportunity to participate in an end-of-the-semester competition and project called INTEX. It is a weeklong project where groups of 4 students have the chance to incorporate all the knowledge and skills that we learned during the semester in each of our classes to create a website that solves a real-life industry problem. In addition to creating a website, we also write a report and present our solutions to judges at the end of the week. This semester, the problem to solve was for the BYU archaeology department. BYU archaeology digs for mummy remains in Egypt; they find all sorts of artifacts and mummy remains, and the researchers needed an effective way to record and keep track of all the data they find. We created a website to enable researchers to enter in a variety of data from their archaeology digs; we designed our website to store this data in a database that can be accessed from anywhere in the world that is then displayed in an...

 The 4 th of July has always been one of my favorite holidays. I love the warm weather, the fireworks, the gathering of family and friends, the great barbeque food, and the overall vibe of Independence Day. I had the great opportunity a couple years ago to do summer sales back east in Pennsylvania. After selling for a couple hours in the morning on the 4 th of July, my buddies and I ditched the doors and headed to the beach in New Jersey. We played beach games like spike ball, frisbee, and football. Spending the day playing on the sand and in the water was a blast, but the best part was when the night came; we got to sit and watch an awesome firework show over the water. Since I had lived in Utah my whole life, that was something I had never experienced. Watching fireworks in the sky reflect across the water in the ocean was an amazing sight to see.

I really enjoy playing strategy games like Risk or Chess. I am a competitive person, and it is fun to be able to test my logical and metal reasoning skills while also spending quality time with friends and family. Playing competitive strategy games with family and friends is also fun because each person plays differently, and it is interesting to watch how different people solve problems and work through different strategies. Each person has a different risk tolerance (I am not referring to the game Risk in this case); practicing taking risks in a risk-free environment helps us get to know each other better, and it helps us know how people might react in real situations. I plan to play these games with my future children to teach them how to think through things and problem solve. Just as long as you don’t take it too seriously, playing those types of games can be a great activity.