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.

Week of the 5th week in the 5th six weeks

This week in computer programming we were introduced to strings and lists. I think that I understood the lesson on strings pretty well. Matthew, Blake and myself all finished the first and longest of the labs rather quickly. We finished it on the first day while everybody lagged behind. We also finished the other two labs in around 10 minutes on the next day and we then spent the rest of the class making fun of Blake. On Friday we were introduced to lists which are very similar to strings but are not immutable. We got started on the lab but we only finsihed about 1/4 of it.

That is all for this week,
Kapil

Week before Spring break

This week was a really fun one in computer programming. Unfortunately, we only had two days in class. The first day we were allowed to mess around with the Finch some more. We had to use three other programs on JES. Matthew, Blake (Yes, the fat one), and myself all wanted to do the stock reader and of course it is the only one that doesn't work out of all six of them. We then proceeded to goof around the rest of the day. The next day we just watched a bunch of TED talks. More on them in my reading reflection later. The coolest one out of all of them was this cool computer that was built out of a webcam and let you do pretty much anything anywhere. It was quite fascinating and i can't remember for the life of me what it is called.

Thats all until the end of break.
Kapil Out.

The week before the week before the week of spring break.

This past week in computer programming we were given one last day in class to work on project 02. It was interesting experience and quite different from the first project in the aspect that it was much more useful than an Angry Birds prototype. It was a demographic like project that had us making bar graphs. Luckily Mr. Stephens gave s most of the code for the outline of the bar graph. All we had to do was create the bars, write formulas to create the data, and get user input. Of course we also had to write comments as well. The last two days of the week we got to mess around with a robot known as the Finch. The programming was quite simple as it was just Python and it seemed like a much more in depth version of Jeroo. But it was a really nice break form the long labs that we normally do. Hopefully we do more of it in the future and hopefully the Finch's designers will come up with a wireless receiver as well.

Kapil out.

Mr Stephens, this blog was accidentally put up on my Ezine blog form last semester. Sorry about the mixup.

First week of Fifth six weeks

This week was an interesting one. We started work on project 2 and made a good amount of progress. We finished the for loop, the while loop and we copy and pasted the code for the creation of the window for the projection. All that we have left to do is create the bars and letters on the bar graph projection. Overall, it was a good week, being productive and interesting, going over concepts we've already done and taking them to a new level. Sam was kind enough to help out Matthew, Blake, and myself after he finished his project which was in a matter of minutes. The only complaint i have about this project is that the variables are named quite strangely. An example of this is the letter b for the proportion of couples that will have children.

Kapil out.

Week of the end of the 4 th six weeks

This week was quite a simple one right up until the end. And when i say that i mean that at the end i had to work quite extensively on revamping my project. The first two days of the week i just worked on lab 5. I ended up having to redo the lab about 3-4 times just because Python kept on crashing on me. I ended up finally getting it just fifteen minutes before the end of class. I just spent the rest of the class dreaming of the 4 day weekend, which i thoroughly enjoyed. Overall i enjoyed my weekend except for the fact that i spents about 2 hours overall correcting my project.

Thats all for this week.
Kapil

Strange week at best

This week in computer programming we were assigned both a lab and a project in just a 2 day week. The lab seemed simple enough, but when Matthew's shadow stole my seat i was forced to move over to Fabian's seat when e was absent and work over there for that period of time. The next time to recover my file i sat over there again but as soon as i tried to save it, Python crashed on me. Having to do the lab all over again made me angry a little bit, but luckily it was a pretty simple so i was able to finish it before class was over.  However this set back made it so that i was unable to start on the new project.
Hopefully there will be no more unfortunate setbacks this coming week or in the weeks to follow.

Kapil out.

Project week.

This week was quite an interesting one. We got assigned an angry birds project. It was basically a giant lab with writing comments. I would love to see us doing this again. It was quite fun and only took slightly longer than a normal lab. It also provided a level of difficulty unseen in any other labs. In addition to this we also did some coding bat challenges. They were all quite interesting, some with wildly absurd topics. One of them was about squirrels smoking cigars and not just like one or two cigars, but up to 60 on weekdays and without limit on the weekends. Next time i would like to see us do a new topic going over conditional loops. Technically we already know how to do it but it would be quite nice to review the concept.

Kapil out.

Blog of 1-27-12

This past week in computer programming, we ran into several challenges on lab 4A. They had to do with silly syntax errors. We were having trouble understanding exactly how specifically the python responded to  specific types of code. For instance, we forgot to incorporate to capitalize text when drawing the diagram on several line of code. We also realized that we had to set the background color with "white" and not the numeric value. It was jut these simple programming errors that set us back. The new project seems interesting but challenging at the same time. I wonder how long you will give us for this project. It will be really annoying to write comments for each section of code. It seems that it will take a really long time.
Anyway those are my thought about this past week.

Signing off,
       Kapil

Its Been a While

Well this is the first blogpost of the new year and my first blogpost in about 12 weeks. This week in computer programming we were introduced to Python in its entirety. Previously we had only been working with Jeroo and using the Python language. However we are strictly using a written language now with no visual aspect. However that may soon be subject to change as Python does contain several modules, with at least one of them being a drawing program. The module I speak of is Turtle and comes pre-installed with Python. I would love to see us experiment with Turtle. During my brief experimentations with Turtle, I have come to enjoy using its playability and sincerely hope that the others in my class will be able to enjoy it as well. Thats all for this week but i will be writing every week at least for the foreseeable future.

Signing Off,
        Kapil