Today was our last day before the summer. We continued to work on our parallel computing notebook and I caught up and finished mine by the end of class. In our activities we talked about super- computers and how it would benefit to use a supercomputer. We also saw this video of the blue water headquarters, where their are a lot of supercomputer, and we ended up talking about how the place could manage them.We then went to Virtual Box, and made a galaxy model, which was very cool. I am really excited, for the summer and can't wait.
I was absent today, due to a NJHS event that I went to. I came in on the next thursday to catch up what I had missed. Aaron talked about what parallel computing is, and how it could help people do things faster and better. I then started to work on activities to help me understand computing better. I had to make a how to and write out all the steps. Then I had to identify the dependencies and the tasks that happened in my activity. Overall I learned a ton about computers and had a lot of fun.
Today, we had half the class period to work on our project. AJ and I have finished the project, and I was just working on some minor fixes. I had spelled forest wrong, and had to change the spelling. I also had to link my portfolio to my forest fire page. I worked on my HLD and added some functions, that I had on my java script, but didn't have on my HLD, which is a high level design document. I presented my project, and am looking forward to parallel computing next.
Today was the last full day to work on the project. AJ and I worked on the code, when we realized our code didn't really work. I had put in 60 trees in my array, but only 1 tree showed up. We were really confused, so we went to get help by Ernie. Ernie had us start over with a better starter code. This made it a little easier, since we had more of a guide on the second starter code. We finished a lot, and by the end we had our trees and fire, but we couldn't get it to spread. I decided to come back over spring break to finish it off.
Today, we kept working on our group project. We had to work on our HLD, which is the HIgh Level Design document which is basically a plan of our project. The final steps of the HLD, were really hard, because you had to break down the code and figure out how to test that it works. Our step 6 became 2 1/2 pages long, due how much we broke it down. In the beginning, we didn't really break it down, so we had to restart.
Today we started our second group project of this month. We figured out our partners, which Ernie picked for us. My partner AJ and me first read through Ernies HLD so we knew what to write. Then we started writing our HLD for the rest of class. In the beginning, writing the HLD was really easy because all we had to do was come up with a story. As we progressed, it turned into a lot harder than I expected it would. we had to come up with functions and basically figure out what would be going on in our functions. Thankfully, it started to make a little more sense as the class continued on.
Today we finished our month/unit on Java script programming and understanding the basic principles. Today was also the last week to get our stipend form filled out, if we wanted to get paid for the work we did in the fall module. We also talked about objects and learning how to draw with java script. I love art, so I was really excited and drawn to the fact of being able to draw rectangles, change the color of the shapes and clearing your canvas. You may not be able to detail it like an actual painting but at least you can create some decent looking shapes. We also learned about the 4 arguments of a rectangle, which tells you were the rectangle will go on the canvas, and the width/height of the bouncing particle.
Today we went into more detail about javascript. We learned about arrays and using while and for statements in javascript. It was very interesting after you got the basic concepts of java scripts and understanding how to use the console to your advantage. I really liked this program that we built on which was Follow The Leader/ It was originally aarons model, but all the apprentices sort of made it their own.We edited the colors and shapes, trying to make it really interesting Overall I had a pretty good time this week!
This is the first class, after our fall module. We started to learn something really frustrating and new, but probably be worth it at the end. It is a language called Java Script, which is used with css to make websites better. We learned a few phrases in Java script, and worked on conditional statements. We had to be able to decide based on some numerical equations if they were true or not by using the principles we learned in Java script. We also learned the different types of datatypes. Overall this week was pretty interesting.