Internship Work and Assignment

In the morning on the 6th of September we had a discussion in our office with Professor Yong Yang. The discussion was about our assignment for the coming 5 weeks.
Basically we will be programming full time in a computer language called FORTRAN. FORTRAN is a very old programming language created by IBM in the 1950s. With FORTRAN we will try and solve various aerodynamics problems. These problems are mainly focussed on pressure distributions surrounding 2D airfoils. After the discussion I had to call in sick on my first internship day. :(
I'm not sure what happened but all of a sudden I didn't feel good at all and my temperature started to rise quite a bit 38.5(C). So I went home around lunch time and slept for a total of 20 hours!
The next morning the temperature had dropped and I wanted to catch up on the reading Frank and Stefan had done in the previous day.
Fortunate for me programming has been a hobby of mine in which I'm starting to get more and more familiar. During the summer I have been working as a web-developer in PHP/MySQL for a consulting company. However those are different languages than FORTRAN. Luckily all program languages contain similarities at least in the basics. Within a day of work I felt quite comfortable in the FORTRAN language and tried some of the smaller advanced code examples. This went relatively well.
During Wednesday afternoon I challenged Stefan to try and build the game Tic-Tac-Toe within Fortran. In my experience setting a challenge which people can associate with, in this case a game, allows people to rapidly learn while increasing the fun factor of what might some times seem a bit dull.
Within in a day we both created our own games and during the process I was able to teach Stefan the concept of using Arrays. This turned out to be quite useful, because on the last day we were asked by one of the Chinese students to try and produce a Matrix solver. Which solves matrices for any size.
This assignment was a new experience for me and I gained a new insight in how I could use my programming skills to produce helpful tools. Solving matrices was a subject that was handled during the first year of my Aeronautical Engineering course. Although this is relatively not to hard it would have been nice to sometimes check the answer of matrices that I tried to calculate during that time.
Who knows a possible future in developing education tools? We shall see in time.
Frank mainly focussed on solving geometry problems regarding triangles. So he did not participate with our little challenge. In the coming weeks we will focus on solving the various problems set by the professor starting with the non lifting pressure distribution around a 2D cylinder. Not sure if I'll post about these things since I can imagine that it might not make sense to most people that read this ;)