Final Post - Year

This year has had its ups and downs, but it finished on a high note.  We started out with just learning about computers and just general knowledge things about technology.  I was fine with learning about these things because I had never really known about all the technicalities and inter-workings of computers.  We then moved on to Scratch, a program that allowed us to drag and drop codes onto a screen and make a sprite move around a screen  After Scratch moved on to HTML coding which I really enjoyed, as we were able to make our own website.  I wrote about my chickens and how to take care of chickens in general.  Now I could make a similar website about my muscovy ducks that I got about a month ago.  I believe that learning HTML was the most useful thing that we learned this year because it will allow us to make our own websites in the future and personalize them as we choose.  After HTML coding came Jeroo, which was our first exposure to python.  Jeroo was enjoyable up to a point, but making the Jeroo move around the map just got a little repetitive and annoying after a while.  Especially as seeing that on our final exam last semester I was extremely close to getting the code to work on all of the maps, but since I couldn't get the code to work perfectly on one of them I had to accept the lowest grade.  At the beginning of the second semester we started off with learning more python by completing labs that covered a range of things that can be done by python coding.  I liked the python labs for the first few of them, but after a while finishing them got a little hectic and I had to go in for tutoring as I wasn't able to finish them during class. After we were done with python we switched to an android app inventor with an interface similar to scratch.  I really enjoyed this app inventor and since I was so far behind I caught up by doing 12 apps over the weekend while I was at home, so now I am the most ahead in my class.  Now I have time to work on my final app which I am still trying to figure out what it is that is actually plausible for me to create.  I am planning on creating a game that will allow the user to move a character around the canvas through a maze and if they touch the wall they will blow up and have to start again.  But if I am unable to do that then I have no idea what I'll do.

2nd Semester: Nineteenth Week

This week was very hectic, I still had lab09 from a few weeks ago and lab10 as well.  I totally forgot how to do anything with matrices in Python so I had to ask Mr. Stephens for help.  I stayed after school on Wednesday and was able to finish lab10 and the hardest part of lab09.  The nest day in class I worked on lab09 and I almost completed it but I still had to put the final matrix into a new file, and I just couldn't figure out how to do this.  So, on Friday I stopped the computer lab during my Delta class because I wasn't doing anything else and finally finished lab09.  It feels like a huge burden was lifted off of me, because for a while I had a 20 but now it's back to a 100.  I am trying to get a head start over the weekend by downloading the MIT Android App Developer and working on the corresponding apps.

2nd Semester: Seventeenth Week

This week I had a short week because of the TAKS test on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.  This week we had a choice between processing and moving on to lab10, and we chose processing.  Within 10 minutes of starting processing we had to switch to lab10 because of students being off track.  I went through the prelab but I didn't have time to ask for the lab so I guess I'll get that at the beginning of next class.  Lab10 is about dictionaries and I understand them a lot more than matrices so I'm a little more excited to work on this lab rather than the last one.

2nd Semester: Sixteenth Week

This week I had to start work on my next assignment, lab09.  Lab09 deals with matrices which I detest, as they don't make much sense to me.  I haven't gotten very far in to the lab I just can't figure out how to separate the elements into different sub-lists.  I try, and try and all I get are errors or incorrect syntax.  I finally got the right answer at one point but the code printed the answer out multiple times and I couldn't get it to only print once.  So, all in all I have no idea what is going wrong.

2nd Semester:Fourteenth and Fifteenth Weeks

These weeks were just filled with cramming before the end of the six-weeks.  I finished lab08 last week and we were assigned lab09 this week although I have barely started up on it.  We also had a few quizzes over this two week time span.  I had to retake a few of them but thankfully I got the score I needed on the first try.  I don't think that I'm going to enjoy matrices.  It seems like they take a lot just to make a group of numbers, and you have to assign the number of integers per row and column and then assign numbers to all of those open spots.  I am not really looking forward to working on lab09 but I'm sure that it will be over soon.

2nd Semester: Thirteenth Week

This week all I worked on was lab07.  I quit working on lab a and went on to b and c because I just couldn't seem to figure out was wrong.  Lab07b and c were both very straightforward and I was able to finish them in about 10 minutes total.  So, after finishing them I went back to a again.  After a quick consultation with Mr. Stephens it was just a problem with the number I was using to subtract from one of the variables.  After fixing this the cipher worked just as it should.  All I have to do by the end of the 6 weeks is lab08 so I hope that it is not too difficult.

2nd Semester: Twelfth Week

This week we worked on lab07 a-c.  All of lab07 is centered around ciphers.  I think it's pretty cool, because you watch movies now and they're always decoding different kinds of ciphers.  Even though these are very basic ciphers that we are working with they are still the same idea as the more complicated ones just with less characters.  We are also decrypting the ciphers that we recreate.  We also have lab08 coming up but I still haven't looked at it.  I don't think that all of the lab07's will take me that long to finish on Tuesday once I figure out what it is I'm supposed to do.