Candid Student Reports

The following reports were written by members of the Shodor Scholars Program. Some elements may have been removed for various reasons, but the text that remains is in the student's own words.

Christian and Adrianne

Today I had fun doing starlogo. I like this program the most so far. I truly understood everything without having that much assistance. I had fun today and I had a good day except for and incident I had with an instructor. I will try to be more cooperative but I have to say that I will give the respect that I recieve.

Kevin

Java was cool today, but annoying, because I already know the language and once I started to get back what I've lost over a few years of nonuse, everyone else was still struggling with printing stuff to the standard output. It would've been nice if I had been allowed to grab a tutorial off the 'net that I could work with at my own pace. And Logo... well, StarLogo sucked. I don't know what that has to do with programming, but it can't be much. You should use METAL (http://www.iit.edu/~sarimar/GDS/metal.html) instead; it's a free Mac metacompiler that has english-like syntax. It'll be more like a real language in function, and really easy for beginners to understand. I just hope I don't go nuts tomorrow afternoon.

Allen

today we did Java programing which was difficult at first but i got the hang of it. Next we used star logo and that was COOL. :)

Cesar

today was ok we learned how to do java and java which we calculated body mass and starlogo

Jennifer

Today we learned how work Starlogo and Java. It was ok. Talk slower.

David

Today we had a quick introduction to Java and StarLogo. I thought the programming was a lot of fun. I wish we could move on more quickly. StarLogo is not that fun.

Freddy

Today we started with the Java programming language. It was lots of fun. I really enjoyed making the BMI (Body Mass Index) calculator. The how fast you will fall calculator was very fun too. Then ther was lunch. After that we started StarLogo. StarLogo is kind of boring. I didn't like how it was taught. I think that it was in the "right" order. In short, I didn't like it much. Java was much more fun. Very fun I can't stress it.

Elizabeth

This morning we were inroduced to Java programming. We used Java to write several simple programs, including a program that calculates a person's body mass index. This afternoon we used Star Logo to create models. I now feel confortable using both languages to create simple programs.

Charles

Today we learned a little of Java programing. We used this to create a model of Body Mass Indexs. This is a system where the computer measues the amount of your body that is fat. It was fun, but challenging. We also learned a little of starlogo. We created a termite model, where termites pick up wood chips and move them to next to other chips (simulating the building of a "hive"). I enjoyed it very much.