Final Post

        Computer science this year was an interesting class. We learned the fundamentals of programming first, like what loops and things do, but I think that they could have been a little more interesting. Scratch and Jeroo were great learning tools, but I don’t really think Alice was very useful. The user interface was confusing, and I don’t really think I learned much with Alice. I thought that there could have been an easier way to teach how the syntax of programming is organized. We could have learned even through just drawing things on the chalkboard and taking notes, or even skipping to Jeroo and learning it along with Java syntax.
       When we got to Java, I don’t feel that a lot of the stuff we learned was beneficial or really motivated the class. Not to just criticize, but I think we should have learned the mechanics of loops in Java by using object oriented programming. The programming class I took in 7^th grade did this really well, where we had a pre-made class called “gameobject” which made it easy to use object oriented programming, because all you would do is assign things as game objects and then set a picture and it would appear on the screen. I found that much more satisfying to see my programming coming alive in front of me instead of seeing numbers pouring out of a console in JCreator. This being said, I learned fundamental concepts both ways, but I thought the visual way was better. This could also be the way I learn, people learn lots of different ways.
      Overall, I enjoyed taking this course. It had its ups and its downs, but it turned out that I learned a lot from it. The way the subject matter was taught could have been a little more captivating and interesting, but it didn't take too much away from the learning experience. It was still a great class, and I'm glad I took it for my tech credit.

How big is Google?

I found a picture while stumbling called How big is Google? and it's an infographic telling interesting facts about the Google search engine. I found it interesting because it explains just how giant a corporation Google has become since the launch of the internet, and just how fast a company can grow based on a new concept, like Google did with the internet. Here's the link.

Weekly Reflection

This week in Computer Science we did a bunch of labs that had the user enter input, like playing a Xylophone or entering words for a quiz. I thought that this was actually useful, and that I can now use App Inventor to make apps that could do something. If I ever get an Android phone, I can now make apps to show my friends and family, that won't be just drawing on a picture.

22 Tracks

I stumbled upon a website called www.22tracks.com/, where apparently they created a project where a bunch of DJs from Amsterdam got together and chose 22 tracks for each music genre, each of which they thought clearly defined a specific music genre. I thought this was a cool idea and decided to write about it.

Weekly Reflection

This week in computer science we worked more on using app inventor, but the functions became more and more complex. We got to the point where we were making apps that could go and find and record a persons current location, instead of just having a bunch of colors and painting on a cats face. I would be a lot more interested in app inventor if we were making things like brick breaker or something that has entertainment value.

Computers on our Wrists

Now this is an interesting idea I found on a design blog, and it combines the concepts of a wrist watch, a cell phone, and a computer all into one. I'm pretty sure this is a fictional thing, but the idea is still cool if it were feasible. It seems to combine touch technology with actual keyboard compnents. Check it out here.

Weekly Reflection

This week in computer science we started on app inventor. App inventor is a free tool developed by Google with a very simple interface similar to Scratch. You drag and drop components you want and then launch a blocks editor, which can then assign functions to the components. You can run your app on a virtual emulation of the Android OS, or you can run it on an actual Android phone if you want to. This software is available to everyone who has a Google account. I also like what Google did by coding the blocks editor in Java, making it compatible with every major operating system (Mac, PC, Linux).

League of Legends

As people already know, I like to play games in my spare time. Recently I picked up a game called League of Legends, which is a free game which is a mix between real time strategy games and action games, where you control a character who moves around the map and has damaging abilities, and the point of the game is to kill the other teams nexus and protect yours, but each of them is protected by lanes of towers that you have to go by to get to the nexus. You can also kill enemy champions to make it easier. But overall for a free game this game is amazing.

Weekly Reflection

This week in computer science, we worked in an application called app inventor, which was a fairly basic programming layout, similar to scratch. The layout was all drag and drop, and when you actually needed components to do things, you would open a blocks editor, which would allow you to create functions for buttons and such. I thought that it was a lot like scratch, but with this we were actually making things that were worthwhile. We were able to make apps and test them on an on onscreen emulator or on an actual Android phone, and I also think that this might be what dethrones the iPhone from its reign of awful (Just because it's Apple doesn't mean you look cool if you buy it)...

FL Studio

As many of my friends do, I also enjoy listening to certain genres of music featuring computer made sounds. Usually called "techno" or "electronic" music, there are many subgenres such as dubstep and house, so I decided to try my hand at making some of this music. Using Fruity Loops Studio, I was able to create my own tracks that were incredibly crude (sound, not content), but I learned how to do this, and I hope to develop my skills a bit more until I can make decent original content.

Weekly Reflection

This week in python we worked on files labs, which I didn't actually get done, as I was finishing up nested loops. Thank god though, we had a challenge to complete Lightbot 2.0 to replace one assignment, which was very useful for me. It is a programming type concept of a game, and was really fun to play. It had a similar layout as Scratch. It was fairly simple, and I actually showed my dad who is an electrical engineer, and he thought it was really cool.

Peasant Quest

Homestar Runner is a character I have enjoyed throughout elementary school. Who is he? Well, he is a flash cartoon who has friends like Strong Sad, Strong Bad, and Strong Mad. I know this isn't making any sense, but in one of the cartoons, Strong Bad draws a picture of a dragon called "Trogdor the Burninator" who is supposedly a dragon who kills an entire village of peasants. In the game Peasant Quest, you play a peasant who has had their house "burninated", and seek vengeance on Trogdor. The thing I like most about this game is the fact that it is in a sort of 8 bit art style. Check it out at .

Weekly Reflection

Through the past few weeks, we have been working on using Nested loops, which are useful in telling if two conditions are true, and then giving output accordingly. This includes things like finding if the length of a word is 6, and then seeing if the word has a J in it, for example. This was a lot harder than just plain Else/If/Elif, but didn't prove to be all that much of a problem.

Video Editing

Recently, I have found myself playing a lot of Call of Duty: Black Ops, and got together with a friend and decided that it would be cool if we pooled our skills at the game and video editing and made some cool videos about the game. These included just a lot of general things like gameplay and talking about the game, and all of which had awesome effects over the gameplay.

Weekly Reflection

This week we used Python to check the length of a word given. I thought this was fairly easy, and got through the labs fairly quickly. In comparison to the Elif/Else/If labs, this was much easier, because all you were doing was checking word lengths or seeing if a certain letter was in a word, so it was just using a boolean operator to check true/false values.

Heatsink

This week, I learned the importance of proper cooling on my computer, when I looked over at my core temperatures on my CPU and saw that they were around 120 Fahrenheit. I thought, "Hey, maybe I should get a better heatsink than the stock heatsink that came with my Phenom II X4 965. I was thinking about buying a water cooling heatsink, but the one I was looking at cost $110, which is just a wee bit expensive, so I'll probably end up getting a Cooler Master or something.

Weekly Reflection

This week in Python, we learned how to use Else/If/Elif statements to tell if something is true, and then execute an event if it is true, and else to tell if something isn't, then execute something if it isn't. We also learned how to do Elifs, which are nested else/if statements, where if a condition is true, and if another condition is true, then something will result, else something else will happen.

Birthday PC

My friend Frank Feder recently burned out his laptop screen by leaving it on during a LAN party, and the screen burned out. For his birthday, a bunch of his friends contributed spare computer parts they had, or just bought new ones, and for around 200 bucks we build him a decent gaming PC. The graphics were something to be desired (ATI Radeon HD 5450) and paired with his 30" INCH MONITOR, the icons on his desktop were about as big as his fist. But, other than that, at least he had a PC.

Weekly Reflection

This week in computer science we learned about strings and math in general. We learned how to take remainders of numbers, how to make things return numbers in some cases. Like you would make a scanner record input from the user, and then the program would calculate something. We learned about the different types of variables, and more about ASCII.

Back to the Basics

A few months back, I went to Fry's Electronics with my dad for him to pick up something or other, like thermal paste. We got there, and I kind of automatically gravitated towards the games section, and saw an old game I used to play called Call of Duty 4. I used to have an iMac before I built my kickass gaming rig I have now. I used to have to run this game on lowest settings or else I would get a ton of frame rate lag! So I decided to buy it again, and then I went home and installed it, and it ran easily on maximum graphics. It wasn't so much the game, just the fact that I was remembering how much fun it was, even if I had to run it on lowest graphics. The campaign was the greatest I'd ever played, besides Portal. The multiplayer was fantastic, and the leveling process was a huge reminder of how much fun I had with this game.

Weekly Reflection

The second week of computer science consisted of messing around with getting things to calculate simple formulas for you, like gathering side lengths of a triangle or rectangle from the user and then combining them to get the area, or perimeter or something along those lines. I thought this was fairly simple, because it was just adding all the things we had already learned to an equation for a shape.

Borderlands

My latest interest in a game is a game called Borderlands. It takes place in a post apocalyptic desert type environment, where you play as one of four characters, all with different abilities and specialties. The game is a fusion of Role Playing and First Person Shooter. You level up, and gain levels to be able to use certain guns, which have varying stats. You embark on missions to gain experience points and get more weapons. The more levels you gain, the more damage you begin to deal, but the enemies also get tougher. It's a battle of strategy, teamwork (4 person coop), and skill with a gun. With a team of 4 of your friends and a game like this, you really can't go wrong.

Weekly Reflection

The first week of computer science of the spring semester, we pretty much jumped headfirst straight into Java. We learned about creating scanners, and how to save input into the computer. I didn't think that this part was all that hard, just a bit repetitive. We practiced recording different types of variables, like doubles, integers, and other such things. This was pretty easy.