Along those first two months at ITP I've been going through several amazing learning processes. I've been dealing for the very first time with a wide variety of tools. Of all them, I think programming to be the most powerful.

My experience with technology was really poor just two years ago. I didn´t even have a computer capable of more than text processing (which by the way was not that bad because then I used to write a lot and now I never do). Then, just after starting to think about appling to ITP, I could finally get myself a powerful pc. That was only eighteen months ago.

Since that moment, and I must thank the amazing unestability of such a machine, I started to become, against my will at the begining, an expert in pc troubleshooting. I just couldn't let the machine beat me. I discovered in me the perseverance of willing to solve it without giving it to an expert and not knowing what was going on. The record mark: 10 hours non-stop. But I won. Little by little, I was starting to figure out what was going on on the machine that was starting to be the center of an important part of my life. As almost always, self-teaching me.

The process was just like when you come to live to a new city. You start aknowledging your street, then the street where you go to work or school, then the streets around those and so on. Your mental map starts being formed by islands, and then one day you walk along a street and you connect two of those islands, and then two more, untill you get a whole mental image of the city. You won't know every corner (we never get to know everything about any issue), but you know at least where everything is.

So my mental image, my knowledge on computers started to grow. But there was a very important limitation. I only got to know what I was seeing throught the screen. I didn't dare to open the physical box where all the stuff was going on, because at that point it would have just been too much. Funnily enough, I only really did that when I needed to take out the sound card and take it to New York (I couldn't get to bring the whole machine), the day before flying to the states. At that last moment with my computer, I realized that I was ready to start messing with that, because I could understand what everything was and how it was physically connected.

And here I reach the point where all that history of pretechnology leads to. As I said, I found programming to be incredibly powerfull, because it gives you the power to control the machine. But if one doesn't understand how are the devices he or she is dealing with working in a physical level, one is again dealing only with a computer screen.

Physical computing is a way of understanding the very basics of thecnology. Everybody has heard that at the very first level computers deal with ones and zeros, but very few people know what that really means. I certainly didn't before being in this course. And I am so glad now just to understand what all this is really about.

It is not that knowing the basics of electronics will make us be better html or lingo programmers, but dealing with wires, leds, motors and a chip that is actually dealing with them in a ones and zeros basis makes it all have sense. It is all about understanding what is really going on on the basis.

Then, from the point of view of the applications, nothing could be more open than physical computing. Since it's all about wireing, soldering, and controling ones and zeros representing voltages, with the help of all kinds of chips to make it a little easier, physical computing is the best tool to create tools.

Therefore, I personally see physical computing not as a finality but as a tool (and also sometimes as a liberation from the in-fornt-of-a-screen work). A tool to create what is not created and that I think might be better than a mouse and keyboard to control something made with programming. Since I'm not really the best skilled for that, I don't see myself right now involved in great physical computing projects, unless it is in a shared project as mainly a coder. But neither would I have imagined myself with the midterm project, which I think is at least decent.

Whatever comes, even if you only take the required course, physical computing is maybe the most surprising and complete course we do at least at the first semester. It is really powerfull from the point of view that you are controling not only the software, the programming, but also the interface. Differently from all the other courses, there's a previous step of building the interface that we are going to use.

The resulting product is years away (or decades, actually) from those we use to record video or program with lingo, but the fact that we control every single component of it gives us an unreachable power to the whole thing that we can't dream to have in the rest of things we do at ITP.