Whether you happen to be a college student majoring in computer science, a high school student aspiring to do so, or simply an amateur of any age or walk of life who enjoys getting creative and has a passion for technology, the world presents opportunities to take advantage of this every day and everywhere. The following are 3 fun challenges for anyone who has a love for or interest in technology.
Greener Gaming
Smartphones and tablets, while portable and easily accessible, have their share of limits due to constraints in size and storage in comparison to a desktop computer. This is also true when it comes to gaming, where games played on a desktop computer, especially one designed for gaming, allow for greater speeds and graphics than would be possible on other devices. Unfortunately, this is enabled to due to their exorbitant energy consumption and use of high-end parts, which ends up making them not particularly environmentally friendly.
Yet despite these concerns, there are many ways to make gaming machines greener. These include selecting parts and accessories that consume fewer watts, which is easier to do for computers that are custom-built.
Furthermore, manufacturers themselves have become more aware of environmental concerns in recent years. Apart from these initiatives, it’s prudent not to overlook some other salient advice, such as turning off electronic devices when they are not in use or utilizing the operating system’s power management features to cause the computer to enter a low-energy standby mode when left idle for a certain period of time.
Defrosted Fingertips
Another great challenging project for technology enthusiasts is making touchscreen-compatible gloves. While the touchscreen on your smartphone allows for convenient viewing and access throughout most of the year, the winter months present a challenge, as the gloves one might wear to protect their hands against the cold prevent the touchscreen from recognizing your fingerprint along with making the touchscreen more difficult to use properly, which can be at best inconvenient and at worst fatal should an emergency arise unexpectedly.
This is because smartphone touchscreens utilize capacitive haptic technology. In other words, they respond to electrical impulses sent from the body through the fingertips into the screen. While gloves with built-in fingertips that can allow users to properly make use of the touchscreen on their smartphone do exist out there, it is more fun, not to mention cheaper, to make one using one’s own ingenuity.
For those whose interest in technology happens to accompany an interest in sewing, this project is ideal and as easy as sewing a thread of conductive material into the fingertips. It is likely that one may only want to alter a few gloves at a time, not to mention that threads of such material can be quite costly. Therefore, only a partial spool of such thread, for whom suppliers of small and cheap quantities can be found with a simple online search, will be needed.
Mobile Apps
The ubiquity and accessibility of smartphones make mobile apps an exploding new market that is perfect for those seeking a technology-related challenge. These apps can fulfill just about any demand, whether personal or social. Anything from keeping track of your individual health parameters to competing in games with other players throughout the world from anywhere can be done with the right mobile apps.
The first step is simply to discover what type of market you may want to reach out to and what you would want your app to be able to do. Countless online resources exist that provide the best mobile app building platforms out there through which you can make your idea for a mobile app into a reality.
For all those who have an interest in undertaking challenging technological endeavors for fun or for convenience, there are so many ways to do this both online and in our everyday offline lives. One can remake and reuse old items or create mobile apps that anyone anywhere can download and use so long as they have access to a smartphone or other such device.
Our modern world offers so many opportunities to take advantage of and markets to explore and profit from when it comes to technological innovation. There is no reason they cannot be both fruitful as well as fun for all of us together.
