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November 22nd 2013
I had to make up the class that I missed last saturday, so today it is Friday. We just learned about a new type of modeling called agent modeling. Personally, I like it a lot better than Vensim. I guess this is mostly because I'm more of a visual person and agent modeling just looks better. Besides that, we were told what our project options for our first modeling projects are. I am very excited to start on this.
November 23rd 2013
So after just a day I'm back at Shodor. Today we took a break from all the modeling we've been learning to learn about a couple different things. First we learned about office ethics. After that, we revisited terminal to learn more about the specific commands and all. I happen to like Vim, maybe even better than I do Text Wrangler. It definitely is a bit harder, at least at first, but I really like how it looks. I'm even writing this blog in it right now. Well, I guess that's it for now.
December 7th 2013
Today was the first day we had to work on our projects. It turned out to be pretty productive; my partner and I were close to being done long before the day was over. Even now we still have more than an hour until we leave. My partner, Julia, and I decided to do the project "Art Walk". The goal of this project is to find the best positioning of sculptures in the hallways of a school to minimize students' delay as they walk from the classroom to the cafeteria. To create this simulation that would model the 3000 students walking through the hall, we agreed to use Agent Sheets. It was pretty easy, though we did have a few problems. We did work them all out, though. The only thing we have left to do is to test the program with the differently positioned sculptures. In addition to what I did at Shodor today, I did a lot of programming over Thanksgiving break. I made a machine for a competition- one where you buzz in and answer questions. That was very fun to make, with the actual box and buttons in addition to the user interface on the computer programmed using Java.
December 14th, 2013
Unfortunately, Julia was not here today, and it was another work day for our projects. Without my partner, I didn't really want to work ahead on the Art Walk. But, even if I wanted to, I couldn't have, because we were working on it on her account, and we never put it somewhere where I could access it. So, today I verified my website using the online validator. There were two errors in my home page and two errors in my blog page, and I still had to make the portfolio. First I had forgotton to put two slashes after "http:" in one of my links. That error was easily fixed. The other one was about the unorganized list on my blog page. Apparantly saying "ul2" wasn't valid, they all had to be just "ul". Anyway, after I fixed those two errors, I started making my portfolio. To do that I just copied the blog page and changed it a bit to make it be a portfolio page. Also today I wrote the office ethics essay, which was due today. Other than those things, I didn't have much to do, so I just played around a bit with the code of the website and finally wrote the home page introduction paragraph.
February 1st, 2014
Technically it's our first day back at Shodor, not counting the optional workday we had last week to finish the projects if we hadn't already. That day went well, and the presentation we had today went a lot better than I had expected. After the presentations, we learned a bit of programming concepts and about operators. We had a couple worksheets to do throughout the class.
February 8th, 2014
Today we continued learning about javascript. There wasn't much that I didn't know before, but I do enjoy relearning it, and it helps to review so that I don't make more simple mistakes like I did today. For our whole lesson I could not figure out why my alert was not popping up, but then I finally realized that even though I had moved the file to my public folder it was still saving to documents. It was a bit frustrating, but the rest of the day I kept up with the lesson.
March 1st, 2014
When I walked into the apprentice lab this morning I thought there was something wrong with the computers. The letters "BBCD" were covering the screen and there didn't seem to be a way to exit out of it. I didn't want to mess anything up, so I figured I would just sit and wait for an explanation. It turned out that BCCD was used for parallel computing, and nothing was wrong with the computers. Our lesson focused on parallel computing, and we were walked through a few programs such as Galaxsee. It was completely different from our normal lessons, but I enjoyed it.
March 8th, 2014
Today we learned about the hardware of computers and how they are built. After our lesson we had a competition to see who could "build" the best computer using parts we found on the internet. This is one of my favorite activities so far. It was so much fun hunting for cheap but good parts on the internet. We had a budget of $970, but I didn't use quite that much. I think my computer cost about $700-$800. Even still, I think it was pretty good. I hope sometime we do some more hands-on activities like this, maybe with circuits or something. I really like engineering and things like that.
March 20th, 2014
Today we resumed our lesson on parallel computing. This time we got to the actual parallel part of BCCD; we used a few of the computers to quickly solve large problems, rather than having just one do it. We learned about the different types of parallel processing. We also had a few group activities to show how using different methods of parallel processing made a difference.
June 30th, 2014
Today is my first day back at Shodor. It’s a bit different now that it is summer, and since I missed the first block I am sort of making up for the week I lost. One of the projects over the summer is to write a HLD document for a model, then switch with another apprentice and actually create the model described in their HLD. Today I decided to do the model that simulates ants trying to find food (sugar) using pheromones. I finished writing the HLD for it, but I think I have to change a few more things. I decided to work on it more at home so that I can get started on the model tomorrow. After I made the draft for the HLD, though, I worked a little on my website. I made a whole new design for it, and I’m really excited to try and implement it.
July 1st, 2014
Today I finished up the forest fire model from spring so that I could present it (I was absent on the day we were supposed to present in spring). After the presentation I emailed a copy of the HLD I was writing to Eric, and he replied with some feedback. I should be done soon. Since that was taken care of, I got to start on the actual modeling part of the project. I received the HLD called “Fashionista Phil”, which is basically a model of what color is popular among the people. If one of the people meets someone wearing a different color, they might decide to wear that color instead. And if a color gets too popular, they might get tired of it and start wearing different colors. I’m doing this project in agent sheets, and it is a lot of fun, even though I had hoped to be assigned one of the other models.
July 2nd, 2014
After completing the HLD, I got to work on my model. The drawback with using Agentsheets is that although it is easy to set up the canvas and where you want to place the objects and things like that, when it comes to actually programming the objects to do things you only have a limited set of commands. Because of this it requires a lot of commands to do something that would have been very simple in Javascript. Because of this I spent the majority of the day copying and pasting command after command to get it to do what I wanted. One of the major problems I had was trying to get a person in black clothing to randomly change into one of the six other colors. However, the only way to do this using the commands given to me was to use “percent chance” to one by one decide what color it will turn into. So even though I used the same percent chance for each color, they got less and less likely to turn into colors such as blue and purple. For the later commands I had to increase the percent chance so that the chance that it would turn red was equal to the chance that it would turn orange, yellow, green, blue, or purple. It’s a bit hard to explain, but it’s easier to understand when you’re actually looking at the model. Anyway, by the very end of the day I had finally finished the model, and now all I have to do for it is post it on my website.
July 3rd, 2014
Today I implemented a few more ideas I had for my Fashionista Phil model, then put it on my website. With that done, I worked on my website for a while, finally re-writing my about me section. I also added a logo I created in Inkscape. I learned a lot about using Inkscape; I enjoyed it a lot because I really like drawing and computers… and putting them together is good too. To practice using Inkscape we traced some well-known logos to make them into vectors, and we got to change the colors and things like that. I had a lot of fun with it. My favorite one that I did was the Nike symbol, because the way I made it looked really cool.
July 7th, 2014
Today begins the third block, so all the other apprentices are back. In the morning Joel taught us about Subversion, and I put a copy of all my files onto version control. This seems like it will be useful in the future when I edit my website or my projects and then decide that I want to return to how it was before or compare my designs to previous ones. During his talk, Joel would stop a few times to help people who were having trouble, and during those times I played around in AgentSheets and created a spaceship game. It’s not that complex, all you do is shoot at UFOs and dodge their bullets. After lunch we continued working to put our files on the version control. Those of us who were done got to read the Gimp tutorial for simple gif animations and make our own. I made one of an ostrich running and put it in my portfolio.
July 8th, 2014
This morning we began the day with a lesson in PHP taught by Joel. I’m pretty sure I like PHP, but it’s kind of annoying when you have to combine it with the html. I wish it were like Javascript or HTML or CSS in that you could make it a separate document and just link them together. Other than that, it’s great, and I like that we’re learning a lot of different languages. After lunch we worked on a few PHP projects. First I made a page that has a random background color, generated using PHP. That one was pretty easy. Then I started on a dice simulator, which was significantly harder. I’m still stuck on trying to make an animated gif I made of a dice “rolling” turn into a static image of a random side of the dice. I have gotten it to show the number of the side it landed on in a table, though.
July 9th, 2014
I’ve had to re-think my dice project. The way I was making it wasn’t working, and I’m trying to think of an easier way to do it. At first I thought PHP was easy, but now I’m having a lot of trouble with it. It’s a bit frustrating, and I spent a long time working on my project without making much progress. I hope that I after a few more PHP lessons I will be able to understand it better.
July 10th, 2014
After our lesson today I decided that I needed to take a break from the dice project and work on some of the easier projects. And somehow, after completing the background color chooser and “Dane Joe”, a program that switches the first letter of your first name and the first letter of your last name, PHP clicked with me. I understood it so much better, and by the end of the day I had flown through most of the projects, including the dice simulator. Now all I have to do is the calendar and the xml blog.
July 11th, 2014
After our last lesson in PHP, I started to work on the Calendar. This was by far the hardest PHP project I have done, and after I had made a little progress I decided to switch to the xml blog and complete that. It was pretty easy, but there was one pesky little bug that I couldn’t get rid of until the end of the day. It is now almost complete, but I still need to format it a little better.
July 14th, 2014
Today Joel taught us about using databases, first in terminal and then a little bit in PHP. We are going to learn more about accessing databases in PHP tomorrow. Since the lesson was fairly short we had the whole after-lunch period to work on our projects. I quickly finished the xml project I worked on last Friday then started on my last PHP project: the calendar. I think this is the hardest one, and this is the reason I put it off for last. I had a lot of trouble with it when I worked on it on Friday so I just scrapped what little I had to start anew. It’s a bit easier this time, and by the end of the day I had remade it much better than what it was before.
July 15th, 2014
Today we continued our lesson in databases, again using terminal. This time we learned more about creating more than one table and grabbing information from both to form a new table. After lunch I worked more on the calendar project. I finally finished it! This means I’m done with all my PHP projects, unless I decide to add to them.
July 16th, 2014
After our database lesson this morning I began to work on a new project in PHP. Since I already finished all the PHP projects, this is just for fun and practice. It is a crossword puzzle game where it allows you to type in your answers into the grid. I’m still having trouble putting in the small numbers at the corners of the boxes, but I think I got pretty far. After that Eric Horton asked a few of us to help with converting word documents into html pages, and that took me the rest of the day. I only have a little bit more of that to do.
July 17th, 2014
Today while working on my crossword puzzle game I had a lot of problems, and eventually I decided that PHP/html probably wasn’t the best language to use to make it. Because of this I took a break from it and worked on a Sudoku game. This was a lot simpler, and I have almost finished it. The only problem I’m having is that when I click the button to check the answers, it reloads the page for some reason and deletes your progress. That aside, it is already functioning as a puzzle. You just can’t check your answers yet. Today I also finished the work I had received from Eric and put the files back on the flash drive.
July 18th, 2014
There was no lesson today, so in the morning I worked on converting more of the word documents into html. I did four more, and I think they’re all done now. After lunch Phil assigned us a new project. This one is a mysql project, and the goal is to create a page where you can create bookmarks for other web pages. I have made the PHP that creates the form for entering the name, URL, and tags of the bookmarks. It also inserts the information into a mysql table. However, it is still not displaying the tables, and it doesn’t have other features like deleting bookmarks, searching for bookmarks, etc. I hope to finish this soon, but since this is Friday, and thus the last day of the block, I will have to wait a while. I think that I won’t be able to come for block three, but I’m not exactly sure.
July 21st, 2014
It turns out that I was able to make it to the third block. Today is the first day of the new block, so we’re getting into some new stuff. This morning began with a lesson in programming concepts. I didn’t learn too much new stuff because I had already learned most of it. However, after lunch was a lot of fun- we began the engineering section. At the end of the day we had a competition to see who could design the most structurally sound shape using a program they made on their website. Somehow, even though I really had no idea what I was doing, I won! It was very fun, and I am excited for the next engineering lesson.
July 22nd, 2014
Our morning class focused on regular expressions, which were pretty easy to me. After lunch, for the engineering class, we built towers for a competition. The scores were calculated by multiplying the height of the tower by the number of marbles it could hold. Our tower was 28.5 centimeters tall and held 114 marbles, however we stopped the marbles being put in at 90, so the score was only 2565 rather than 3249. But even though we cut it off even though we could have easily made it to 100, our tower came in first place! I was very happy with the design, even though the finished construction was a bit lopsided and there were a few improvements we could have made to it.
July 23rd, 2014
Today we learned more programming concepts, this time focusing on using Ajax. I'm very happy that they addressed this, because I was wondering how to get new information without reloading a page, but somewhere along the line I got lost, and now I have no idea how to complete the project they assigned us. I wish I had paid more attention, not just so I could complete the project but also so that I would know how to use this in the future. Later in the day I had to shoulder surf with the apprentices, so unfortunately I was not able to go to the circuitry class.
July 24th, 2014
This morning I had signed up for "manual labor", so I missed the morning programming class. Manual Labor turned out to be building a little Fe, which I enjoyed very much. I was assigned to putting together one of the computers that would be put inside the frame. After lunch we began another competition that consisted of building a track that would launch a marble, then using data we took to determine from how high we needed to drop the marble to land it in a film canister. Whoever's marble went in the most times in a row would win. However, we will have to re-test them tomorrow because the point they chose to place the film canister was too far away.
July 25th, 2014
Today those of us who had worked on the little Fe yesterday had to make up the class we missed because of it. We learned about recursion in Javascript, and we were assigned another project. The goal of this project is to create a Koch snowflake using recursion in Javascript. Although I understand recursion much more than I do Ajax, I still am having a bit of trouble with the snowflake. It's mostly because the Javascript canvas is really annoying and I'm always having trouble with drawing lines. Anyway, after lunch we finished the marble competition, and, much to my surprise, our track won with a total of five marbles in a row. That means that I have been in the winning team for all three competitions I was in! Unfortunately I had to leave early, so I did not get to participate in the boat-building competition.
July 28th, 2014
I only have two more weeks of Shodor left before it's back to school. I still have a lot to do, so I definitely have to work really hard for this final push. Today was a workday, so I decided to get as much done as possible. Thankfully after thinking about the snowflake project for a bit I finally understood it, and by lunch I had finished it. I also thought about the Ajax project, but I still haven't come up with a solution. Phil asked me if I would be interested in bringing in my Arduino sometime, so I figure that I will do that on Thursday.
July 29th, 2014
Finally I got the Ajax project done! It was such a relief to finally get it working. Now I have another project down. I made a list of all the things I need to do, and it is still pretty long. But even though there's a lot of thing on it, most of them are pretty easy. I'm sure I will be able to complete them by the end of the summer. Today we also learned a bit about writing resumes, and we have to write one and put it in our portfolios. It's another thing added to the list, but it shouldn't take too long.
July 30th, 2014
In the morning I decided to finally figure out where my blog posts for the spring block went. Without them, I couldn't fill out the spring stipend form and get my stipend. It took a while, but thankfully I found them in an old copy of my website. I made sure I wasn't missing anything else from it, then deleted it to free up some room in my public_html folder. It's really gotten cluttered in there, so organizing it was really helpful. Now it won't take me as long to find things, and hopefully I won't lose anything else. From now on I'm writing my blog posts in a separate word document so that even if my posts do disappear again I won't lose them for good. Tomorrow I'm going to bring in my Arduino. I'm really excited to show it to everybody!
July 31st, 2014
Today in the morning the mysql databases were broken for some reason, so I couldn't work on my store project until they fixed it. Instead I tried to figure out how to make my website responsive. I was a little bit confused, so I asked Phil about it. He pointed me to a video tutorial that was extremely helpful. It was about half an hour long, but I didn't watch the whole thing. After watching the video I was easily able to complete the assignment. Now my website is responsive, and the only thing left on my to-do list is the store project! Also, after lunch I did a short presentation with my Arduino. There wasn't really much to show, but it was fun nevertheless.
August 1st, 2014
I spent the entire day today working on my store project. It's a really big project, so it took me a long time. I still haven't finished it, but I did come close. I've decided that I really like PHP, so it's pretty fun. After a whole day of working on it I'm a bit tired of it, though. Hopefully I'll be able to finish it on Monday.
August 4th, 2014
Today I worked on my store project again. I'm organizing the code better and basically remaking it so that the different pages of the store are actually different URLs, rather than have one page that displayed different things depending on what you clicked. Before I started to do this, the code was really messy. When I worked on it last week I was basically just thinking aloud, changing mistakes a little bit as I went. I'm glad the project is now a bit cleaned up. I also went a bit farther in the project. Now all I have to do to complete it is to make the purchase history page. I'm a little worried that I won't have very much things to do this week if I finish the store project soon. Phil did say that we might be able make up the engineering classes if we missed them, so I might be able to do the circuitry after all! I'm really excited for that.
August 5th, 2014
I began the day by finishing the store project. I now have it completely done, so you can sign up, sign in, buy items, sell items (if you are signed in as the admin), and view your purchase history. It works really well, and I'm pretty proud of it. The only thing I think I might change is that right now the admin cannot remove items from the store or view other users' purchase history. I had a few errors along the way, but for the most part they are all resolved. This afternoon I created a Mad Libs game just for fun. I did it in PHP, and it was relatively simple. I'm done with that as well, unless I decide to add more puzzles to it. I don't really know what I'm going to do for the rest of the week, but I'm sure I'll find some work to do.
August 6th, 2014
In the morning I added a bit more to my store project and touched up a few things. It turned out that users who signed up from the form on my website could not actually buy things or view their purchase history. I fixed that pretty easily. The other thing that I changed was what the administrators see when they go to the purchase history. Now they can view not only their own purchases but also the history of other users. I think that there are only really minor changes to make from here on out. Before lunch Phil also asked me to test some applications that Shodor might maintain in the future, which I did. After lunch, I finally got to take the circuitry class that I missed! We learned the basics of circuitry, which is kind of a review for me. I enjoyed anyway, because I really like building circuits. I got to make a circuit that lights up LEDs that count up to seven in binary. I was going to do my final presentation today, but I ended up not doing that since the circuitry class lasted for the whole afternoon.