Luis Lopez

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Blog

• Nov. 16th 2013

• Today, we furthered our knowledge in computer modeling. We used the applications Vensim and AgentSheets. Agent sheets is an agent based model which means you change the behavior of each unit/agent. Agent sheets is useful for seeing the interactions occurring in your model. While vensim is more of a diagram which can show the results of the model. We observed an epidemic model and we made our own hunger model using vensim. We then made a very simple foxes and hounds (predator/prey) model using agent sheets. I personally prefer agent sheets out of the two. Finally, today I finished the personal website tutorial which allows me to use this blog.

• Nov. 23rd 2013

• Today, Ron came in and gave his talk on business ethics. It was entertaining, and a good refresher. I also learned more about how to use a command line (Terminal). I now know much more of the various commands which can be used in Terminal. Also, Joel taught us how to create a vim which can be used to write things/program things which can be executed. Terminal is pretty cool, and seems useful.

• Dec. 7th 2013

• Today, We had the entire day dedicated to working on partner projects. My partner was Miguel, we picked the Art Walk project and used Agent Sheets to model it. We came into very few issues and we are basically finished already. Our project is very colorful, and I'm extremely proud of the bright and pink colors.

• Dec. 14th 2013

• Today, Miguel and I collected more data for our Agent Sheets project. We tried all of our layouts again except with different chances of a person spawning. However, since we were done I spent most of my time working on my personal website. I changed the colors, and I added a cool Tron font. It took me a long time of testing color schemes to finally pick this one, but I'm satisfied with it. I ran into weird, random problems which I had the aid of Miguel in fixing. All I really need to do now is add an introduction to my website and I'm done.

Feb. 1st 2014

• Today, We watched the projects that students created and learned about programming concepts. My presentation went fairly well and we didn't really mess up at all. During the lesson on programming concepts I was able to learn about the different operations in javascript and how variables work etc. I'm hoping to learn more about programming because it was very interesting. In the near future my portfolio will include the Art Walk project that I have worked on.

• Feb. 8th 2014

• Today, we went more in-depth on programming concepts. I learned about if else statements, functions, arrays, and many other aspects of programming. I also successfully got my Art Walk project and the Excel data up on my website. I'm glad that I added some things to my portfolio, and that I was able to add an alert to my personal website.

• Mar. 1st 2014

• Today, we learned about parallel computing and the usefulness of using multiple computers to solve an issue. A large cluster of CPUs solve large problems much faster than a lone CPU. However, if you try to utilize many CPUs on a basic problem it slows down the process because of the additional communication between the CPUs. We also reviewed how to use a terminal.

• Mar. 8th 2014

• Today, we went more in-depth on parallel computing. We used a simple example of Area Under The Curve to show how processors break up a problem and divide it among themselves. Moobin also went over the internal components of computers and how they function. Afterwards, we each built our own imaginary computer online with a budget of $970. Finally, we used BCCD to learn even more on the different functions and commands.

• Mar. 15th 2014

• Today, we continued on with the lesson on parallelism. We found out about different kinds of parallelism such as Data vs. Task. Many people gave talks today including Vikrama who showed us how parallelism works in a model in Agent Sheets. We also used BCCD to dip our toes in the water in how to program using a new coding language: C. Finally, we wrapped up the day going over Area Under The Curve again and writing algorithms.

• Mar. 29th 2014

• Today, we worked on fire models in groups using JavaScript. My partners are Miguel and Ishaan. We made our plan for what we wish to program and we started adding to the starter code and already have many components working such as the actual spread of the fire.

• Apr. 12th 2014

• Today, my group and I completed our fire model and presented to the class. The majority of the model was already finished so we just added a couple things and jazzed up the model with CSS. Our presentation went very smoothly with minimal issues and this may have been one of my best projects so far. For most aspects we went above and beyond and I am very proud of the model.