Today Naylea and I finally got a chance to present our project! We've been working on this project for a month and a half now, and it is definitely a relief to be finished with it. Our presentation went fairly well. We were somewhat unrehearsed, which meant our delivery wasn't quite as professional as I would have liked, but I was proud. I get very anxious when speaking in front of people, so presenting is always nerve-wracking, but it's good for me to overcome my anxiety and confront these fears. Naylea spoke about our AgentCubes model, I spoke about our Vensim model, and we both helped to answer questions. Several questions were asked, some of which were difficult to answer, but I think we handled it well. I could have improved my presentation by standing up while I was speaking and concentrating on speaking more clearly, slowly, and loudly. Our project could have been improved by fixing our time problems and making the models more similar to each other, possibly by incorporating into the agent model different reasons for students to leave the school. In addition, there were some aesthetic choices that made some parts of the model difficult to understand. All in all, I think we did a good job on the project, worked well together as a team, and learned a lot.
We did not get a chance to present this weekend. No presentations were done, which meant that we had a chance to work on our projects, which was certainly appreciated. Naylea was here for the first time since we began working on this project. We worked well together and got a lot of work done. We had to do a lot of editing on the Vensim model because I had some conceptual errors. I'm starting to regret making a time attribute part of the system model, because it hardly ever works, and the time arrow has developed an annoying habit of disappearing. I think, however, that we are at a good point in our project despite the difficulties, and we'll only need to meet up once more to work on a script for our presentation. Our website looks good and I'm proud of what we've done.
Today we continued to work on our projects for the entire day. My partner, Naylea, was absent again today, which means that up to this point I've done this entire project by myself. However, it's been going pretty well. Today, I cleaned up my Vensim model, fixed some errors, and made some minor modifications. I finished my agent model to the point my original story covered; I'll have to talk with Naylea when we meet about any modifications we want to make as a group, but for now I'm essentially done with that. I also began work on the website. I made a basic HTML skeleton for it based off of our index.html setups, and put in a basic project description and screenshots of both of the models. I was particularly proud that I figured out how to input an image as a link and have the computer automatically download a file from that image. Naylea and I have planned to meet on Monday to go over our project together and give her some opportunity to contribute. I worked hard and fairly consistently today, and I got a lot of solid work done. I'm excited to present next weekend.
Today, we covered some more about agent models in AgentCubes, specifically with regards to hill climbing and diffusion. It was another good review of work that I've done before; it wasn't all that challenging, but technical difficulties did interfere rather often. Then, we started working on our projects. We will be working in pairs for this project, and I chose Naylea as my partner. She was, however, absent today due to taking the SAT, so I ended up coming up with an idea and starting the project by myself, which was both fun and stressful. I decided to model the progression and graduation of students in high school, from entering as freshmen to graduating as seniors. First, I wrote out my story for AgentCubes, and sketched the diagram for Vensim. I created the diagram in Vensim, which was fairly easy, but I did run into a couple of problems related to my equations. I started on the AgentCubes model, but due to my computer deciding to quit on me, I didn't have a lot of time to work on it, and only managed to create the first two agents. Next week, Naylea and I will most likely finish this stage of our project, which is exciting. I enjoyed the amount of creative freedom working on this project gave me.
Today, we started working with agent models, as opposed to system models. I honestly prefer working with Vensim to AgentCubes, but the interface of AgentCubes is much more intuitive and easier to work with. We first modeled simple random movement in the world, which was very easy, and I would have been bored were it not for helping Naylea, who was having some struggles. Then we created an SRI model and we had more creative freedom there. My computer had some "technical issues", AKA, it froze and the webpage had to be reloaded approximately every three minutes, which was tiresome and frustrating. However, my model turned out very nicely despite the issues I was having, and I was really proud. None of the skills we covered today were entirely new to me, but it was a nice review. I'm super excited to come up with a good idea and start working on our projects next class.
Today we talked about the equation Have = Had + Change, or, in simpler terms, what you have is what you had plus the change that occurred. We discussed how this model can be applied to many different situations in different branches of learning, such as programming, physics, population demographics, and almost anything else you can think of. We also began to work with system models in Vensim today. I was already familiar with Vensim PLE through the Shodor Scholars Program, but it's been a while, so this was a good review.
I did not attend the session on Nov. 5th because I was taking the SAT. However, I did follow along with the documentation by myself at home. There were many new terms and concepts covered this week, including circular references, G.U.I., visualization, and developer. We continued to work with Excel and developed our skills further, learning how to make a scroll bar in Excel and how to implement it with data. We also learned about "If, then, else" statements, which are examples of what's called branching or nesting. This was an interesting class to look over and follow along with.
Today, we started work in Excel. We had done some work with this over the summer during the Shodor Scholars Program, but none as in-depth as the work we did today. We did a coin flip experiment, where we generated a random number in one cell and called the results of that number either 'Heads' or 'Tails' depending on whether the result was greater than one half or less than one half. We repeated this experiment for different amounts of flips so that we could compare the differences in our results between ten flips and one hundred fips. The results for one hundred flips were closer to having an even distribution of heads and tails than the results for ten flips because of the sample size. We also talked about pseudo random numbers today. Since computers cannot generate truly random numbers, they use pseudo random numbers in an algorithm to generate a "random" number. This is how functions like RAND() work in Excel.
Today we learned more about working at Shodor and the rules and expectations that have to be followed. Ron Broadnax gave a presentation on office ethics and behavior, which he had previously given at the Shodor Scholars Program. It was very funny and informative. We talked about the reliability of sources and did some Google searching about it. I learned that when you Google the mass of the moon, the Earth, or Mars, the answers you get will vary slightly, because of how large the numbers are, and whether they are truncated, rounded, or written in scientific notation. It was interesting to see that the websites that we trust may not have accurate information, and two "reliable" sources may share conflicting information.
Today was our first day of work at Shodor. We went over the apprentice handbook and covered the rules and regulations of being an apprentice. It involved a lot of sitting and listening to a somewhat boring lecture, but the information was important, and we were assured that this would be the most boring of all of the classes we would have. I was also pleasantly surprised to find out that one of my good friends, Naylea Jacobo, was also starting the apprentice program here. I'm excited to work with her, and with all of the other apprentices. When I came here in the summer for the Shodor Scholars Program, I really enjoyed what I did and the skills we learned, and I'm very excited to continue that work in the apprenticeship program. I'm so glad I got accepted, and I'm really looking forward to my future here.