Kongregate

Have you ever been bored in class? Now we have got a solution for you. You can play a different variety of games on Kongregate.

Kongregate is a site where you can play free games. You can create an account and the site saves your scores. It doesn’t matter on which computer you play. And that’s easy when you have to switch classes and need to play on a different computer.

You can play different kinds of games. For example you can play a shooter or an adventure game. But there are far more different genres like action, multiplayer, strategy and puzzle.

Kongregate also brings you a big variety of achievements on all kinds of games. Only the games which people liked best get some achievements to conquer. An achievement is an extra goal to achieve in game. Of course not all achievements compare to each other in terms of difficulty. You have easy, medium, hard and impossible achievements. An easy achievement only gives you five points, whereas a medium achievement already gives you fifteen points. A hard achievement rewards you with an amount of thirty points and though impossible achievements are rare, they do exist and give you a grand total of sixty points. But be warned: Kongregate is not responsible for any keyboard or mouse damage that will occur while attempting impossible achievements!

Depending on the amount of points you have in total you will be given a level. The amount of points you need to go to the next level increases when you are on a higher with each level. The highest possible level is sixty-five. And there are plenty of nerds who made it to level sixty-five.

Now you know what Kongregate is. We use it mostly as a tool against boredom during different computer lessons. Now I hear you thinking: what does this have to do with mathematics and applications? The answer is simple. Lots of games include simple puzzles and during projects we need to solve big puzzles. With the simple puzzles you create a thinking pattern which helps you with big puzzles. And luckily for us, it is kind of fun to do.

That’s it for today. Let’s all make an account on Kongregate and earn some achievements and start your quest to the godlike level of sixty-five.

Rory Tans, Ralf Geelen

Fresh air!

Hello everybody! First of all I would like to thank you for visiting this site. I´m going to tell you about the experiences I had while traveling by train. I have to travel each day to get to my school and fifty percent of the journey is by train. I spend forty-five minutes in that train. Trust me; there are a lot of unusual things that can happen within this time.

The first thing I would like to tell you about is something that happened at the beginning of this school year. I was waiting until I arrived at my destination. Just watching the cows go by. Cows that were black and white, or brown and white or even a combination of black, brown and white! Anyway back to the story. Suddenly a man asks if he can sit next to me. There weren’t many empty seats left, so I let him sit next to me. By the time he’s all settled I noticed he was sweaty. Normally, this is not a problem, if you're sweaty you use a neat invention called deodorant! But unfortunately for me this invention was unknown to this man. So next to me it smelled like milk gone sour. As if this wasn't bad enough the next thing he does is to grab a hand fan and use it in my direction. Where I was first watching cows, I was now having the smell of their product gone bad in my nose. All in all quite a lovely experience for the person who likes nature a lot. But in this case, as a student, I'll pass. After nearly succumbing to this smell, I realized my stop was near. I never thought air could smell this fresh!

Here take a look at this little video about a guy in an interview. Watch his shirt! The guy from the train was almost worse.

Coffee @ Fontys

A lot of people drink coffee. Most of them can’t even function without their daily boost of caffeine. Especially students need their coffee, just to stay awake during class. Luckily, the coffee and tea are really cheap at the Fontys canteen, only 40 cents.

However, since two weeks there’s been a major change. The canteen now opens at 10 am instead of 8.30 am. That means the students can’t buy coffee before the morning classes. There are coffee vending machines in the hallways, but that coffee doesn’t taste as good as the canteen’s coffee.

So, how to solve the coffee problem?

Thank God, Albron once again saves the day. At the canteen, there now is a so called coffee corner, which opens at 8.30am. The coffee and tea are almost four times the normal price, but hey, it’s made with extra love. The coffee is ground from special beans, so that explains why the coffee would be twice as expensive. It’s definitely not worth four times the former price. The tea, however, is still the same. Same water, same tea bags, but four times as expensive.

That leaves students with no other option than to bring their own coffee, tea bags and sugar and buy hot water from the coffee vending machines until the canteen opens.

Until the coffee and tea are cheaper, we’ll boycott the coffee corner!

By Elke Groos and Kim Went

Communication, what's that?

Students from the study Business and Applied Mathematics have a course each year in the first three years of their four year study. During this course they learn how to be a chairman in a meeting. They learn how to get in contact with companies. Communication covers a wide area. So what do the students learn when they are following this course?

In the first year, they learn how to get in contact with a company. They have to ask someone from the company to give a presentation for all the students. So you learn how to approach someone from a company. You have to use formal language. When the person from the company comes to your school you have to guide him around. You have to make an announcement to your class who he is. You thank him afterwards.

During meetings, you learn how to be a chairman. The chairman makes an agenda so there is structure during the meeting, he guides the meeting. He has to make sure that people don't talk when someone is already talking. Another function that has to be fulfilled during a meeting is the function of secretary. The secretary makes notes of the things everybody says. Afterwards the secretary makes a document so everyone can read what the meeting was about.

During all this you learn how to write correctly in Dutch. That's important if you're going to work in a company later. When you are doing all this you get feedback from you're fellow students. You also give feedback to them.

This is just the first year. In the years that follow you learn how to apply for a job, work on your English and how to make contact with an English company. So you learn a lot during those years.

But you want to know more? Come and visit us in Tilburg!