Today was the final day of my second block of the summer. In the morning I reworked my dice statistics project to allow user input to choose how many dice to rolls and how many times to roll it. I had to rethink the entire project and I'm glad I did because it's much more efficient and user-controllable now. I used foreach and for loops as well as if statements to achieve this. I continued working on my calendar project and generated two select drop down menus so the user could choose the month and the day of the week for the first day of the month, as well as a table. I wasn't able to finish this project. In the afternoon, I had documentation for the Explorations in Engineering workshop.
Today I continued to work on Krista's projects. I finished my dice statistics project. I set it up with a dropdown where the user could choose from one, two, or three dice to be rolled, and a table would be generated from the results. I used functions and a switch structure to create this effect. I began working on my calendar project but wasn't sure where to start. In the afternoon, I had my second block meeting with Dr. Panoff. I left early at 3:20 PM today due to not feeling well, but I should be able to come tomorrow.
Today we did mock interviews with Jennifer and Levi in preparation for future interviews. In the morning, I prepared for my interview and worked on my dice statistics project. The mock interview went well. I felt prepared and Jennifer said my answers to their questions and the questions I asked were good. After my interview, I continued working on my dice statistics project. After lunch, I went back to my random hex code generator project and realized I had made a mistake in my program. Instead of generating one random hex codes and echoing it in the background color and in the body text of the page, I generated two separate random hex codes. I reworked my code to fix this problem.
Today I had documentation in the morning for the Explorations in Engineering workshop. I enjoyed listening in on this workshop a lot since I love engineering. In the afternoon, I worked on my dice statistics project for a while, before Jennifer met with all the apprentices for a presentation on interviews. She talked about the importance of preparedness, presentation, and first impressions, and gave a list of common questions to prepare answers for. This was in preparation for the mock interviews we will be conducting tomorrow. After the presentation was over, I continued working on my dice statistics model and began updating my portfolio page to reflect the work I've done over the summer so far.
Today I worked on Krista's projects in the morning for an hour and fifteen minutes. I finished the background color selector project and successfully stored and loaded the cookies. I finished the XML blog project by loading all of the entries through a foreach loop. Then I began working on the calendar generator project. After the break, Ernie taught us about PHP form validation, which is used to make public PHP forms secure. I had to leave at 12:00 today for an appointment.
Today I continued to work on Krista's projects. I worked on the background color selector project to the point where it applies the background color the user chooses to the website. I worked on saving this value in a cookie so the color would remain the same when the user revisited the page. Then I did the XML blog project, where I used a PHP loop to render blog entries from an external XML file. In the afternoon, I worked on the dice statistics project and went over the dynamic web pages demo that I missed yesterday morning because I had reception duty.
In the morning today I had reception duty, which was profoundly uneventful. It was my first time doing reception, and I received one phone call, which turned out to be a wrong number. I used the time to work on my programming syntax guide project. In the afternoon, we had time to work on Krista's projects. I worked on the dice statistics project and began work on the background color selector project, where the user is given a dropdown menu of colors to choose from and the background changes to their selection. It also must store their choice in cookies so it would stick if they were to revisit the page. I created the selection menu.
Today was another day of work on PHP. In the morning, we worked on our random hex code generator project, which I successfully finished. Then we continued working on our coin flipping model. We talked about how to merge HTML and PHP and the difference between embedding PHP in an HTML file, which is a valid way to do it but not the Shodor way, and rendering HTML using a PHP file, which is the way we will typically use here at Shodor. In the afternoon, we had time to work on Krista's projects. I wrote a "Dane Joe" model that switched the initials of the user's inputted first and last names. Then I began working on a dice statistics model that will simulate the roll of a die and generate charts of the sum of the output. I created the die rolling model, but still have to work on the charts.
Today we continued working with PHP. In the morning, we worked on our syntax research project for a while. Then, we created another version of our simple coin flipper model that tallied the percentage of heads and the percentage of tails compared to the total number of flips. We began to work on Krista's PHP coding projects. The first project involved generating and changing the page background to a random hex code. We worked on this project for most of the afternoon. I managed to generate a random hex code, but not change the background color to it.
Today was the first day of my second block of the summer. During this block we will be learning about and working with the PHP Hypertext Preprocessor. In the morning we had an introduction to the rules and operation of the summer program. After that, we worked on a research project where we searched out different syntax for JavaScript, PHP, and one other language of our choosing. I chose Python for this project. After lunch, we began to work on a PHP coding project. This is unique from the other coding projects throughout this program because we began our program entirely from scratch. We built a simple coin flipper model using PHP. After that, we continued working on our syntax research projects until the end of class.