The Final Blog

Well it has been a great year with Mr. Stephens and the whole gang (except for Blake). The course has been amazing. This year I was introduced to many different types of programs that I could use to create amazing things. Although I made some poor choices during class sometimes (such as accidentally falling asleep), the class taught me much. For me, probably the most frustrating part of the class was the temperature lab in python. Most of this was probably due to the fact that Python kept on crashing on me and not letting me save my work to my home drive and me ending up redoing the lab about seven or eight times. Also some of the things that we did in Python were kind of bland. However, I find that i like python much more than Java. The final part of the class was also very fun. AppInventor is a creative way to let kids see their work put out in a more practical and fun way. I would like to see this replace Scratch as a starter in the course.  Over the year we did some pretty interesting stuff, like Jeroo and Python. Jeroo was a good gateway between scratch and python because it had both visual elements and actual programming. We should have spent a little bit more time on this because I felt that the time given to us for each lab was a little bit less than i needed. I often got behind and found myself having to work on the weekends to catch up. If this could be improved upon, then in my opinion the course would be perfect. It would offer the perfect challenge for new programmers and would also prove interesting to those that have experience but just want an easier class than AP Computer science.

kapil out for the last time

Comp prgogramming

This week in computer programming we were introduced to what we are going to do for our final. it is an app inventor for android phone. Over the course of two days i went through two of the labs. Based on my progress, this final will be much easier than the last. The base programming skill is much like scratch with a drag and puzzle like mechanism making the programming quite a bit easeier. MOst of the labs are fun little things, like making a kitty purr, and then painting on that kitty. we also made a phone version of wack a mole.

kapil out.

This week in computer programming, we worked some more with python and we learned about dictionaries in python. Dictionaries allow us to call back files from external sources and use them. They are like matrixes but once they are created, they cannot be modified. IN processing i was able to follow the tutorials instructions and make both star and a plant in the program. I learned how to make it so that I could rotate automatically or i could control it with my mouse. The latter proved to be quite difficult to control as when you set up both the x and y axis fro mouse control, it gets to be a bit crazy.

Kapil out.

Lab 09a

This week's Lab was possibly one of the hardest labs in python history. Dealing with matrixes really opened up the world of programmin and pushed our little group's mind to the limits. TODO 1 was actually the most difficult, stomping our minds for the better part of two class periods. Once we had completed TODO 1, the rest of the lab just flew by with Blake and myself actually earning Matthew's praise and doing most of TODO 3 and figuring out TODO 4 by ourselves. We also worked on Processing a little bit, and found it quite interesting. It seemed like a watered down version of Java, but much more graphically integrated. We realized with this just how much python's graphics really sucks. I would love to see us do more of this kind of stuff.

Kapil Out.

Week 7 of 5th 6 weeks

This week in computer programming we learned about matrixes. matrixes basically store data from other programs and make them usable to all other python programs you create. It is an interesting concept and one that is widely used to make more complicated programs. We were assigned lab 09 this week, but since we had only ten minutes left in the first day of class, we just decide to have a reversi tournament where i pwned Blake and Matthew Williamson. The second day we started to work on the lab and we finished TODO 1. In the time it took us to finish that, Sam finished the entire lab. That kid is a genius. Mr. Stephens also played a joke on us saying that Lien was the first one done with the lab and Matthew took it way too seriously due to his love/hate realtionship with Lien.

Kapil Out.

Almost doing nothing marathon

This week in computer programming we had two workdays to work on whatever we needed. I had finished everything already so i got two free periods. These do not happen often at all and i really enjoyed mine. For most of Tuesday i was on reddit, and for most of Thursday i was on sporcle, quizzing it up with Matthew, Blake, Zach, Severin, and occasionally Mr. Stephens. Matthew Williamson was also there, but he should have been doing lab 6 or whatever he is on. On sporcle we did some pokemon quizzes and were suprised as to how much we actually forgot from the first generation.

Kapil out.

Computer Programming

This week in computer programming we continued to work on lab 08. May i say that thing is way to long. It took us all three class periods. We barely finished on Thursday. We got stuck a little bit on the first part where you made us reverse all the individual lists and make an individual list with them and reverse the order. The second workday I had to leave a bit early and Matthew and Blake finished the averageList function without me. I came back on Thursday and got Blake to explain it to me and i finished up the code.
The last part of the code was the simplest. However, this lab was way to long and in the future i would prefer it if the labs were more the length of all the 7s.

Kapil Out.