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programmingMS 2010
Shodor > SUCCEED > Workshops > Archive > programmingMS 2010

Trent started off today by adding abilities to a lot of the components that the students added yesterday. First came the sliders: we added the ability to change the labels above them, and, more importantly, the variables actually used in the simulation. Next came the start, pause, and reset buttons: they were given the ability to do their obvious functions. One major concept covered today was "for" loops. These programming tools work based on three conditions: a starting value, an ending condition, and an event to do each step of the loop. These were used to do things like run through all of the cells on the grid, checking to see who was sick, who had recovered, and who should become one or the other. Finally, Trent showed the students how to implement the infect, move, and recover methods, used to allow our orange-dot "people" to interact in ways that a population normally would. By the end of the day, all of the students had a good understanding of how the communication within the model worked. They understood how the sliders and buttons talked with the simulation and graphs, what methods were used to do so, and how those methods worked.