Candid Student Reports

The following (emails) were written by members of the Scientific Programming class during the fourth session of the program. Some elements may have been removed for various reasons, but the text that remains is in the student's own words.

Today we were introduced to Java functions.  However short the 
introduction, it allowed us to create good looking code, that is 
easier to construct.  We wrote a program to take the # of sides 
of a regular polygon, and the side lengths, and return 
cartesian point coordinates.  We need to revise our code however, 
to round to a reasonable decimal point, instead of returning 16 
decimal places which were only created by some floating point 
loss of precision.
Ben

Today Dave taught us about functions in Java.  We had several 
activities which were very challenging.  One of the activities 
that we had to do was inputing the length and number of sides 
of a regular polygon and it would have to have the coordinates 
for you. 
Fei

I had fun today.  Today, I was forced to think beyond my 
normal thinking.  I had to think about things that I would 
normally not think about, I would just automactically do.  I didn't  
know that there was so much thought process in somethings!
Carla

Today I spent a lot of time making a program that calculated the 
coordinates of a regular polygon given the number and length of 
the sides.  The program nearly calculated correctly but I ran 
into a problem with the precision problems using double values in 
Java.
Daniel

Today was really intense because I had to put all my knowledge in 
to making one  computer program. It is hard to remember things from 
a week ago and reviews on the last lesson are helpful. I liked 
working on the project at the end of class and we had a good amount 
of time.
Roshen

We learned more in Java today.  First, we discussed code 
conventions, then we edited an existing set of code to correct a 
bug and create a new function.  Then we applied that code to create 
a polygon-point-creation-program.
Albert

Today we learned how to use funtionsand run programs in Java using 
functions that we learned.
Jalena

Today we learned about functions, and I do believe that the class 
ran a lot smoother today.  Good project
Joshua


I found today's class to be equally useful, compared to the others 
we have had. 
Robbie

Le'roy was not here today. I enjoyed it mostly (not the immense 
heat) and learned a valuable lesson: "you're never thirsty 
enough to drink 2 koolaid jammers."
Samuel

Today was the most informative day. We began by learning about 
methods and edited a java program so there were no more bugs 
and changed some existing methods.  We then made a new 
polygon-point program that used our existing code for the coding 
project.
Conrad