Reflection

Well, the semester’s nearly over, so I suppose now we have to look back at what we did over the last few months. I thought that most of it was enjoyable. I rather like the lab format, with its allowance for you to pace yourself, and the challenges were often very interesting. I think that Jeroo is a fun program, though obviously not as in-depth as a full coding language like Python. Now for the criticisms. I don’t like the worksheets very much, in the sense that they are often very redundant, not only when compared to themselves but also to the rest of the class. The questions on the worksheets are all fairly formulaic, and so the problem becomes less fully understanding the concept, and more figuring out the one formula that works and replacing certain keywords over and over again. Not to mention, the labs cover the same material as the worksheets, but in a more enjoyable and interesting way. So, I’d say that I learned whether or not I understood the concept properly more from the labs than the worksheets or the quizzes. While I like Jeroo very much, I was not so much a fan of Scratch. It’s a good introduction to the logic of a computer, certainly, but it always felt fairly limited and simplistic. While you could certainly learn a lot about computer logic from Scratch, I don’t think that it’s a whole lot of good for anything else. Not to mention that Jeroo is pretty good for learning that kind of thing too. Maybe it would’ve been better to cover Scratch and logic more briefly, then go straight into Jeroo, perhaps leaving more time for coding languages like Python at the end of the year. That way, we could learn everything we need to start using a programming language, get started with a basic one with Jeroo, and have plenty of time for things like Python at the end of the year.

Blog!

I'm not entirely sure I like the worksheets in class. I mean, I understand the importance of worksheets and quizzes and the like to test our understanding of the material, but the worksheets just seem too repetitive. Once you get down the basic formula for how to get the problems, its just writing down the same thing over and over again with minimal adjustments to the same basic formula. I think there needs to be more variety to the problems, with each one testing a different facet of our knowledge on the subject of the worksheet.

Blog Post!

Time for a long overdue blog post, on Jeroo. Its overall going fairly well. I like Jeroo, and solving the puzzles in the labs is enjoyable, and also educational. Some of them are kind of excessively complicated, but we've got enough time to get them done, so I'm not exactly complaining. I think probably the only thing I'm having any kind of trouble with as far as Jeroo goes is elif statements. I mean, I get how you use them and what they do, but for some reason I'm just not getting why they do what they do, and what the process behind it is. Its not a huge roadblock at the moment or anything, but it could be a problem later on, potentially.

If

Nested If loops are frustrating. I still like them, because I find the complexity of layers upon layers of different loops enjoyable, but they are kind of hard to figure out nonetheless. Their behavior in certain situations can be very strange. Sometimes, just for what seems like no reason, a loop will just get stuck on one condition and never switch over to the others, resulting inevitably in a very messy Jeroo demise. Other times, it'll ignore certain conditions no matter what. All I can say is thank goodness that we've learned some shortcuts for those.

Jeroo

Jeroo is a very good intermediary language between a drag-and-drop menu one like Scratch, and something purely language based, like Python. It provides a set of pre-determined capabilities, within the context of moving around the Jeroo and having it manipulate the world. Due to its limited set of functions, and the clear context for the commands, it still maintains the ease of access of Scratch. However, it also helps to introduce how programming languages, specifically Python, handle code. It helps you figure out how code should be laid by giving you a small set of commands, and allowing you to figure out how best to string together lines of code, and the general syntax of python. So, it helps to ease you into the language, while still maintained a limited level of control that prevents the programmer from getting overwhelmed by all the available commands, and gives context to those commands so that they're more understandable.

Blog Post!

Well, I hope everyone had a good Halloween weekend. I personally spent it at the museum looking at arthropods, and then watching the shining while eating s'mores, so I'd consider it a weekend well spent. I'm not really sure as to what else I have to say, to be honest. The random and input variables are just a continuation on Scratch, and I talked about what I liked and disliked about that last post. I suppose I do like it much better now that we have those statements, because it gives a lot more freedom to the programmer. Instead of the program only reacting in one, preset way every single time, we can now make them react different ways, sometimes in completely random ways in different situations. In addition, the inputs help give a level of interaction that's much more useful (and enjoyable) than just clicking the start button and watching it go through its motions. It means that changing the way the program acts can happen in the middle of running it, provided you anticipated needing to change something. So, I guess they're helpful in that they give greater control to whoever's running the program, to sum it up. I suppose that's enough to make them worth learning.

Scratch

I think that Scratch is a very good introductory programming language. One thing that sets it well above many others is the way it presents itself. Rather than just popping up a command window and asking you to get started, it offers a selection of different possible commands, and all in a very clean visual style that makes it look much less complex and more approachable. This does have a downside, however, in that it feels a little limited. That all of the possible commands, or at least the commands they are directly derived from, are presented means that you can't really include every command there. This limits the capability of it to a fair degree, but I think its perfectly adequate for anything being done by beginners like us. So, for a summary, Scratch is, I believe, good as an introductory language, but its usefulness decreases quickly as the programs being created get more complex.

The Quiz

There wasn't a whole lot else that happened during the class that week, so might as well. I don't feel that this html  quiz was extremely good. I like the concept of testing on the various html commands, and most of the questions were fine, but I still didn't like all of it. Several of the questions were just things I had never really had to use for my webpage, or only used once way back at the beginning of learning about html, and so it couldn't be recalled to memory. I can't recall any specific questions at the moment, but I know there at least a few that seem to be a bit too obscure to be on there. Still, there were plenty of questions, and a curve on top of that, so I suppose any complaints on the subject fall flat just a little. Something to perhaps consider for next time, though.

More HTML!

Html seems to me, after about a week of working with it, to be one of those "easy to learn, impossible to master" type of skills. The basic tools are pretty simple, and you can create a really bad looking, but functional website very easily. However, in order to do any of the interesting stuff, with animations and the like, you have to include long strings of instruction, which can quickly become incomprehensible if you're not paying enough attention. I suppose that I do like the feeling of satisfaction as I get a particularly tricky aspect of the html or the stylesheet, but implementing certain aspects of the webpages got really frustrating sometimes. I wouldn't ask for it to be easier, since lots of its elements are very simple, and I like a challenge, but it would be nice if html and other code could be a little more comprehensible.

Another Post!

I like html. I really do. Sure, its just a markup language, but its easy to learn, works intuitively, and can be used to make some pretty cool stuff. That it was so easy was in fact kind of surprising to me. As someone with only a little bit of experience with programming and code, that even html could be picked up so easily was unexpected. I suppose I always unconsciously pictured programming as an impenetrable cloud of numbers and punctuation, that somehow completes a task. In any case, that some form of programming, even if its not really a programming language, a\can be picked up in a day or two by a (near) novice is encouraging, if nothing else. If I can manage html alright, then maybe I'm competent enough to move on to the harder stuff soon.

Problem Solving

I really liked the problem solving. Not only did it involve math, which makes it automatically fun, but it made me think outside the box. The last problem in particular required you to look at it a little differently than you ordinarily would. I think that process would have been made easier if the description of the problem was a little clearer (the existence of multiple movers with which to stack the blocks was only really mentioned in passing, so I spent about 10 minutes trying to figure it out before I noticed). Still, I like thinking, and I like thinking creatively about things even better. The way in which you had to look at it before doing the problem, however, just created another problem in explaining it to your group. Attempting to use visual aids and verbal explanations to help them work out the problem a couple times over was frustrating, but in the end it worked, so I can't really complain. I suppose that's just what happens when people with two very different learning styles try to teach each other. A whole lot of confusion and not much progress.

Larry Lessig

I liked Larry Lessig's talk best. For one, as Mr. Stephens said, he really was very good with the visuals. The words and funny pictures and videos would flash across the screen, keeping it dynamic and interesting rather than static. The other reason I really liked it is because he raised a similar point to one of the ones I liked from the first chapter of Blown to Bits, about laws related to new technology. I think one of the main problems that causes the disconnect between the law and the new technology is that laws are most often made by older people, who are as a whole much less tech savvy than younger ones. Your average kid, and now young adults, grew up around this tech, and are intimately familiar with how it works. For another good example besides music piracy, look at video games. The current politicians in the government have probably never played a video game in their lives, and so probably have no idea about how games work, and how they affect people. Young people, on the other hand, know how to play and know lots of people who know how, and so know how it affects their mind. As such, the people making laws regarding video games think it makes anyone under forty into a serial killer, and really annoy all the gamers in the world. I just think there are lots of good parallels, between all different innovative technologies, and how they confuse people, from the airplane to the Internet.

Web 2.0

I learned something new this week! I learned that Web 2.0 actually existed. I had never really considered that web pages could be divided into sub categories. The web was the web, both interactive and non-interactive. That there are subsections and facets of the Internet really surprised me, and I suspect that it would surprise a lot of other people, too. Still, this little piece of ignorance I do feel is slightly worrying. That I, someone who could be reasonably considered "computer savvy," didn't realize that the web could be divided in such a manner probably means that most of the people in this country are even less knowledge than I am. With the web influencing so much of our lives, it bothers me that such basic facts about this new technology could go completely unnoticed by the public large. As the web gets more and more important in everyone's day to day lives, little pieces of ignorance and misinformation like that could really add up, and cause big problems somewhere down the line. Of course, this little errors wouldn't take long to correct, what with Wikipedia and Google being so popular, but that may not help if the damage is already done. It seems like there should be some sort of required "technology information" class or at least assembly in high schools. I might also be worrying about nothing. I suppose only time will tell.

The Week

Well, the first real week of Computer Programming is over, and it went fairly well. We learned about and corrected some common misconceptions of how to use search engines like Google, which I mostly knew already. We also thought about really defines a computer. I must be honest, I hadn't thought about the subject before. If you had asked what a computer was, I likely would have said, "You know, a computer. It computes stuff". I now realize that the barriers of what constitutes a computer are much more vague and ill-defined than I had realized initially. I suppose computer could just be defined as anything that computes, but that includes a number of different things that clearly aren't computers, blurring the issue a fair bit. As interesting as that was, I did appreciate the shift from the philosophical to the practical as we began on the project about computer specifications. As someone who uses computers regularly, I was somewhat surprised at all the different parts included in a computer, and how they affect the experience of the user. The time that we did the project was also very fortuitous, as I was in the market for a new computer at the time, and the information that I gained from it was instrumental in my choice. For anyone who's curious, I went with this one: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=416900&CatId=4928.

Well, I guess that's all I have to say.