Rosie and I set up our area in the research lounge and read “Is Abstraction the Key to Computing?” by Jeff Kramer and a bit of Reductionism in Art and Brain Science by Eric R. Kandel. Kramer claims that abstraction is a vital skill to have in order to write good programs, and explains that some people develop this skill naturally while others do not. He goes on to say that by testing students to see which ones are skilled at abstraction, professors can select which students to allow into their classes. This seems extreme to me. Perhaps instead, students could be tested to see whom among them should be placed into a course where they could develop their abstraction skills to prepare them for further work in computer science, rather than pushing them away from computing entirely.
After the readings, I began to work on an abstraction of Sun Table by Salvador Dalí. I watched a video to refresh myself on perspective drawings, which I worked extensively on with Professor Godfrey in Studio Art.
