Turtle!

Its like Jeroo, but more fun. I honestly like this a lot, though perhaps not as much as just straight programming because of all of the extra rules, but at the same time drawing shapes using turtles is fun, so I'm not going to complain. I particularly like how it gives something that I think is necessary for a lot of beginners in programming, which is context. Not much context, mind, no grand sweeping plot or memorable characters, but some ability to visualize and conceptualize how the code translates onto the screen, which helps make the program make more sense.

Math and Methods

I don't have a whole lot to say about methods, because they're basically the same as in Python, but I do have to say that I'm grateful we're learning the specific syntax. I have a tendency to over complicate my solutions to problems just for the fun of it, and methods help me to at least condense my code. The math library is also pretty much the same, though the differences in data types have been slipping me up, like how I keep trying to use the results from random like they're ints, when they're actually doubles.

Java

Its not all that different from Python, to be honest. I was coming in to this class expecting to have to relearn a lot of things that are different between the two languages, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I've been pretty much blowing through all of these labs and worksheets, with only the basic syntax of things tripping me up but the logic of it staying the same. Maybe that's just because its only really the first week of working with it, though. Perhaps the more complex parts of the languages diverge from one another, but the basic stuff seems to be the same thing with different names attached.

Final Blog Post

I thought that this semester was pretty good. I like python, so using it and learning about it for most of the semester was nice. I thought that the sudden jump to the app inventor at the very end was kind of abrupt, but we had to jump to it some way, so whatever. If I have one complaint about this semester, it would probably be that we almost spent too much time on python. After a certain period of time spent on just python, it all started to kind of blend together, and the individual lessons we were learning felt less distinct from each other. Python is a full programming language, so I understand the need to cover a lot of material, but learning about only python for nearly an entire semester certainly got tiring, if not uninteresting. Maybe we could have done a bit of processing either at the beginning or somewhere in the middle, just to switch things around and give a bit of variety, rather than putting the two new things both towards the very end and spending all of our time basically since we started Jeroo on the same programming language. There was variety in terms of what the different labs were about, and some of them (such as the one with the Caesar shift) taught me some interesting things that were only tangentially related to what we were learning at the time. So, in short, while I enjoyed the class and like programming in python a lot, I thought that maybe we could have mixed it up a bit towards the middle of the semester, so as to keep it all from running together. Also, though I think I’ve mentioned this in an earlier blog post, I wish we could have used Coding Bat more often. I liked the way that it helped to teach all the concepts we were learning, and the constant introduction of widely varied problems on the same subject helped to keep it fresh. They were like mini-labs, and I thought they were pretty fun. The extra involved with completed certain amounts of them was also something that I liked.

Make Quiz and Take Quiz

That was kind of frustrating, to be honest. I'm sitting there trying to figure out what's wrong for nearly forty minutes, and it turns out I could have figured out what's wrong in forty seconds. I suppose that's always true for programming, though. You have a sweeping, elaborate program, in which all is in its proper place... and one typo will send the entire thing crashing down, requiring you to pore over the entire code in order to identify the problem.

App Inventor

Its fine, I suppose. I think I would've preferred a final based on python, but this works too, I suppose. One of the main frustrations is that its a lot like scratch. It just seems like a really simple platform to base the final off of. Of course, making the final in python might have led to some lower grades over all as people run out of time on the final, but the App Inventor just seems a bit too far the other way.

Processing

Processing is lots of fun. I don't think I like it quite as much as Python in that python can do things other than make pretty pictures, but it was still fun to use. It was also pretty useful for figuring out some parts of java syntax. By looking through the tutorials and examples for this comparatively simple language I figured out some things that had been puzzling me about the layout of java, which was nice. Not to mention that some of the images and such that Processing could be used to make were very impressive. I in particular liked the fractals and geometric models.