Blog
July 15, 2017
Today is my last day of Block 2 because I am leaving for Switzerland on Monday. Today was a work day, so I completed my Dane Joe and worked a little more on finishing my Syntax Guide. At the end of today we wrote our weekly reflections, and my job was to take out the recycling.
July 14, 2017
In the morning Miguel gave a lesson on dynamic website creation. Today I continued working on the Jane Doe project. I added boxes and began to understand a little of the PHP code. I used the POST function for the boxes and then created a Submit button which switched the first and last letters of the names entered in the boxes. Ishaan helped me out with my work.
July 13, 2017
Today we continued working on our coin flipping models. I was able to finish the coding for it which I wasn't able to do yesterday because I was doing reception. I watched the video that Ernie took which was very helpful for completing the work. I started working on another one of Krista's projects called Dane Joe which I got help from Ishaan. I will continue working on it tomorrow as well.
July 12, 2017
When I first came in this morning I was assigned the task of front desk reception, which meant that I would sit at the front desk and greet everybody who came in and answer any phone calls to Shodor. I learned all about transferring calls and learned how it feels to be a receptionist, which was pretty fun. After my shift was over around lunch time I came back and joined the rest of the group. We continued working on our syntax chart. I decided to move ahead a little and start on one of Krista's projects, which was the hexadecimal assignment. Ishaan and Miguel helped out a lot with my understanding and coding of the project. I wasn't there for the second addition of the coin flipping, but I will try and complete the assignment at a later date.
July 11, 2017
Today was my first day of the Summer module. We started with a guiding chart on different syntax. We used the internet to find information about JavaScript, PHP, and one programming language of our choice. I chose Python as my programming language. Finding all the necessary information was very tedious work that was a little confusing to me because I do not know very much about programming languages. After that morning part of the chart we moved on to simulating a coin flip using Atom. That was a little confusing as well to me because I do not know much about programming. Near the end of that session Ernie realized the style he was teaching in was not most effective and said we would start again tomorrow. Then we continued with the syntax chart.
April 22, 2017
Happy Earth Day! Today I arrived a little bit late because I was volunteering at the UNC ten-mile run. When I arrived we were starting to connect our computers together into "clusters" which were groups of computers all connected by ethernet cables which were plugged into central ethernet switches. We ran models using programs such as GalaxSee to test how fast the program ran on different amounts of processors/cores. It was pretty intersting to see how it worked because the more processors used for the program the faster it ran, but also at some points in ran slower because of the time it took to communicate with the other computers.
April 8, 2017
I was not at Shodor today, because I was away on a camping trip with my Boy Scout troop. I reviewed the audio recordings for that day to make up what I had missed on April 29. We finished up the parallel computing notebook, and then Aaron started talking about how to rank the supercomputers and touched a little on the history of the supercomputers. At the end of class, we started learning a little bit with Linux, which we would continue in the next class.
April 1, 2017
Happy April Fools Day! Today we started our parallel computing unit. Using Google Docs we learned about Flipping Coins in Parallel, Creating a "Human Parallel Computer," Domain Composition, Parallel Recipes with Instructions, "Going Shopping," and more. We learned about Parallelism in Nature as well, we used models and figured out what kind of data the model portrayed, what kind of tasks happen in the model. Dependencies and communication were key words for today. Dependencies being the computers or agents that depend on other agents or computers to communicate correctly and give them information correctly.
March 18, 2017
Today, me and my partner Paul worked on our coding project. We continued on creating and finishing up our fire model and adding them to our portfolio pages. Then, after lunch we watched and presented presentations. Overall, I think our presentation went pretty well. We got our points across and did well overall. One problem that we had however was the diffusion properties of our model that had carried over from the predator-prey model. This allowed fire to spread to an agent two blocks away but not the one right next to it. If we had more time, we would have added a feature in which the user could pick a specific point for starting the fire.
March 11, 2017
Today, I was not here because I was on spring break in Cancun, Mexico. According to the recordings we spent most of the time working on the code for our fire model project. We asked questions if we needed help and worked out our problems. Me and my partner communicated through email to work on the project.
March 4, 2017
Today we started working on our Spring group projects. We are making fire models using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Today, we started mapping out and making plans for our course of actions. Since my partner Paul was not here today I went ahead and made our story which is that: The world is covered with trees. Fire can be spread from tree to tree. Trees become burned when lit on fire. Wind can be controlled. Faster winds means the fire will spread farther. Temperature controls the chance of a fire. A colder temperature will create a lower temperature for fire. there are clouds which move around, percent chance of creating lightning. Human carelessness can be a controlled factor that can be increased or decreased. Higher carelessness means greater chance of fire.
February 18, 2017
Today we continued our work on converting a predator-prey model into an Sick and Healthy model. We worked more with Javascript and Atom. Today we installed a package into a Atom called eslint which helped to correct our mistakes in our code and justify the syntax.
February 11, 2017
Today we started out introducing web console, put stuff, get stuff back, algebra, comparisons, disease model and took it and changed it from Predator, Prey model to SIR Model. Learned to comment out lines, and use more variables.
February 4, 2017
Today, I was participating in a Science Olympiad competition so I wasn't able to come to Shodor. However, I listened to the recordings and did the work along with it. Aaron, the teacher for the day started explaining how to convert a Predator-Prey Model into an Infected-Healthy Model. We used the Atom application in order to change the code.
January 14, 2017
Today was a make up day due to the icy and dangerous conditions of the Saturday before. We spend today presenting our Agent Cubes Online and Vensim models. Our mentors gave us advice on how to present better and be better speakers. We were told not to fidget as it could be distracting, and to project our voices so that everyone would be able to hear. You should never turn your back to the audience and be prepared with what you are going to say. This will all lead to a better overall performance in speaking.
December 17, 2016
Today was a half day due to icy and dangerous driving conditions. So, today we started at 11 and finished at 2:30. Everyone continued to work on their model projects and my group made some progress towards completing our Agent Cubes Online and Vensim models.
December 10, 2016
Today we continued to work on our model projects with Agent Cubes Online and Vensim. I helped Andy work on the Agent Cubes in which we added another agent called snapping turtles which replaced the idea of alligators which we originally had.
December 3, 2016
Today we worked again more with Agent Cubes Online. This time we learned more about diffusion of scent in which agents are able to follow other agents in order to interact with them more easily. Today, we started our monthly project to display an idea with different kinds of models. For our project we will be using Agent Cubes and Vensim. The idea we are using are ducklings in pond that can grow up to become older ducks, but the ducklings can be eaten by alligators. In order to reproduce the ducks have to eat bread which is given by humans on land.
November 19, 2016
Today we started our work on Agent Cubes Online. We used "stories" to help us write the code so that the Agents could Exist, Act, and Interact. We worked especially with the Susceptible, Infected, and Recovered, or SIR models. We adjusted the rates of the infection using a slider bar. For the SIR models we had to create shapes to help with our work. The story that we used was that if you are a healthy person next to a sick person you, there is a percent chance that you will become sick, if not then you are moving randomly on the world. In this model there was a clock, and if you are a sick person then after the clock reaches ten which means the agent moved 10 steps which simulates 10 days you will become a healthy person. Also, the sick people would move slower than the healthy people. During the beginning of class we went over the homework which was using things in the real world to create a Have=Had+Change model. One of the examples I used was a bank account. The money that you Have is the money that you Had minus the money you withdrew, plus the money you deposited, plus the interest gained from the interest rate times the amount of money you have.
November 12, 2016
At the beginning of class today we went over the homework which was finding things in the real world that used a Have = Had + Change model. One of the examples I used was a bank account. The money that you Have is the money that you Had minus the money you withdrew, plus the money you deposited, plus the interest gained from the interest rate times the amount of money you had.
November 5, 2016
Today we started learning about programming concepts and ideas. With the help of Dr. Panoff who was leading the class today we created a list of programming concepts that we would be go over and learn during the apprenticeship program. This list included concepts such as: GUI (Graphical User Interphase), Iteration, Visualization, Syntax, Semantics, Variables, Boolean, "If then, else..." statements, formatting, quality assurance, etc. Today we used Microsoft Excel to create pages in which we developed and used tools such as slider bars and graphs. For the slider bar we created a number associated with it that acted as the median between the number that was used as the y-intercept. The slider bar changed the number acting as a median which allowed for the intercept to become a negative or decimal number. This would not be possible without a median acting between the intercept and the slider bar. Another we used was a check box. If the box was checked that means that the slope of the graph would create a steep line. If the box was unchecked the slope would not create a steep line. Another idea we used were pets. There was a certain total of dogs and cats. Next to that was a total of pets. The total number of dogs was a fixated value however a slider bar changed the value of cats increasing or decreasing the total number of pets. Today we talked about diffusion as well, a concept that we elaborate on later.
October 22, 2016
Today we created several simulations using Microsoft Excel. Simulations are a way to create the objective of an action, without technically doing the action. Today, we started with a coin flip simulation. We iterated the activity several times to get a better an idea. For the coin we created a page in Excel which would give us a Heads or Tails based on chance that was less than 50%. We created a counter that counts how many the coin landed on heads and then created a counter that showed how many times we conducted a flip. We divided the number of heads by the number of iterations to give a percentage of the amount of heads. At the end of class, we used Excel to start working on diffusions with repeated iterations to see how one time step would affect the agents around it.
October 15, 2016
Today we began class by thinking of what comes to mind when we think of models. This list included ideas such as: fashion models, system models, agent models, simulations, blueprints, etc. The list only shows a few of the endless possibilities. Next, we went over the homework which was to google answers to four different questions. These questions were: "What is the Mass of the Moon?", "What is North Carolina's Population?", "What is the Connection of the Song 'Sing a Song of Sixpence' to NC Pirates?", and "What is the Boiling Point of Radium?" We googled the answers and stated our sources, however the answers of most people were contradictory. The cause of this may have been because the mass of the moon cannot be measured very accurately, neither can a large population such as that of NC. For the pirates question although there were some contradictory responses the majority concluded that it was used as recruitment tool. And because there were too many different outcomes from different the boiling point of radium was not justified.
October 8, 2016
Today was particularly uneventful considering it was the first day, but that was because we had to go over all the rules and objectives of the apprenticeship program. We learned about the High Level Design (HLD) Document which outlined our personal portfolio for the upcoming year. Today was really a day of introductions and learning about our upcoming year at Shodor. We received our usernames and passwords for our computers and we received notebooks to take notes from our discussions and lessons.