June 6: Don’t forget your evaluation time tonight. Come with a faculty evaluation and I will have your evaluation we can discuss. I have not submitted the grades yet, so read the evaluation carefully. The room is the Computer Center in the Library, room 2617. Directions should be on the white board in the Center.
5:30 Christian
5:40 Kirsty
5:50 Ev
6 Anne
6:10: Weston
6:20: Grant
6:30: Max
6:40 Jon
6:50: Joe
7: Sky
7:10: Sara
7:20: Casey
7:30: Katie
7:40: Nellie
7:50: Quinton
8: Francisco
8:10: Camille
8:20: Alison
June 1: We have 2 group presentations tonight. Be ready to go. We will also have both a content final and our last competency exam at the end of class. There are a few folk who still need to pass a competency or two. I will come in at 5:30 tonight and I will have an extra competency exam you can take as well. We will have our evaluations on Monday, June 6 from 5:30 to 9:30 in the Computer Center in the Library, room 2617. The classroom location will be on the whiteboard as you enter the Computer Center. Come with your self evaluation and the faculty evaluation. I will give you my evaluation and we can discuss them. I have 10 minute time intervals, but if you would like more, see me and sign up for a couple of slots. If Monday does not work, please see me tonight, but also make sure you do not forget. It is a hassle for all parties if you miss the eval, so be sure to write your time and location down. We will also have our last seminar tonight. Come prepared. Again, list 3-5+ areas you agree with and another batch of areas you disagree with for both Kurzweil and Shermer.
May 25: I will be available in the CAL lab or common area from 4:30 to our class time at 6 if you need help with competencies or programs. Please email me ASAP if and when you plan to be there. If I do not have people or emails I may be out on a quick walk, so email a time so I do not miss you. Come with a paper copy of a program or competency in case we are in the common area without a computer.
May 24: We had a very stubborn problem we were trying to fix with Ev’s mastermind program in class. What should have been a 5 minute fix was much longer. In the end, there must have been some side-effect issue or unprinted embedded character in the code, because just recopying it, or copying from another source fixed the problem. The point here is that when you thrash.. that is you have tried everything you can think of, you need to get help and let me solve it. Some weird issues like this one are beyond what is expected for this class. Just remember to first show me what you have working, what you have tried already, what the output problem is, and a pointed question about what you think should be happening. I will get back to you, but time is running out. First, again, seek help from each other. As in this case, however, that may not be enough and you need to email me.
May 23: I still need a number of folks to make their entry into the Job Presentation Forum and make a couple of paragraph summary of their presentation along with their sources for the presentation. This is a requirement. Please take care of this this week. Today in class we will start our BRAIN group presentations. There will also be a summary forum for this presentation. Each group should give a short outline and sources post. We will have about an hour of time in class tonight to work on competencies, and also your portfolio programs. If you need help on a program like craps or mastermind, please do the following: Make a paper copy of your last working version. Then print a paper copy of the code that you have added that is not working. It is much more efficient for me to look at you code this way and make some notes. We will also have competency exams both tonight and Thursday. Again, that is your first priority. Correct your last competencies and/or go over them with other students. We will have one last chance for each on June 1, the last class session. It is a very bad idea to have to worry about passing on this test. Plan to get your 4 competencies checked off this week and use the additional attempts to improve, not to pass. One last note: when you are trying to find the errors in a program, make ample use of alerts and document.write statements so that you can watch your program as it is running. Print out the values of variables and trace them as they run. This will usually tell you WHERE the problem is, and that is 90% of the problem.
May 15: I am still having trouble running some programs from your cubbie. I am assuming you are still working on finishing some of these programs, so I am not checking them off. Still, some are not working at all or crash. Please make a folder in your cubbie called FINAL, and put your finished program in this folder. At the same time, if you are not able to fix a program, please email me with a question so you can get unstuck and finish.
May 11: We will have some extra time in class tonight to get help on your competencies and on your programs. Make sure you have tested all of your old programs to identify the versions that work and the ones you still need help on. We will also have the make-up Content competency tonight. Come prepared.
April 30: Make sure you are ready to give your presentation on Monday if you have not done so. Make sure you have posted to the Presentation Summary forum a couple of paragraph summary and your sources. We will start on the third competency this coming week. You should be either finishing up TTT, or you must be seeking help to get it done actively. Try adding the big colorful buttons to your existing code. It will take very little effort. If you did not pass the content competency, you will have another chance in a couple of weeks. Continue to review the KNOW questions. We will add some new ones in the second half of the program.
April 26: I updated the Classes/Week 5/April 25/Solve by Exhaustion page and it appears to be correct now for both example programs. Again, for this assignment, copy and past one of the two examples and run it. All you need to do is to change the if statements to match what you are looking for in the assignment. See what you can figure out. Make sure you spend time on both the Seminar Prep and KNOW topics. For Seminar prep, again, look for questions/comments/personal experiences that you want to share. Focus on that in your paper. There should be no sitting on hands during seminar time. For the KNOW test on Wednesday, make sure you know all of the questions, but particularly the first half dozen. Also focus on the diagrams. It would be a good idea to have a study group before class to share notes and test yourselves on the questions.
April 25: Make sure you have your presentation material ready to go tonight. Put the ppt or other preparation in the Workspace folder on Orca so you can get it easily, or have a thumb drive. Review before class the KNOW questions. We will review these tonight and you will have a competency exam next time on these questions. You will need to pass these questions, so get them out of the way the first time. We will have a second exam later in the program, but if you do not pass them next time you will want a make-up so your credits are not in jeopardy. The best bet is to spend enough time so you have the question down pat. We will also have our first competency on writing code tonight, and a second attempt at the read code as well. About a half of the class passed the read code competency the first time. Congrats. This will allow folks who did not to find a mentor to walk them through the read code competency. This is the best scenario.
April 22: I have added 2 new forums. The first is a site to help you form new study groups. Add to this forum a request to meet at a time/place/topic of your choice. Give your contact information. Let me know if you need further assistance in forming study groups, and make sure you consider gchat/online options. I also added a forum to post a 2+ paragraph summary of your job presentation, along with your sources. Make sure you do not forget this post. Look though other posts if you want to refresh your memory or do further research on a presented topic. I am still the only person who has posted on the TTT forum. I made another post today, part of an email reply. First go here with questions if you cannot go to a study group or get help another way. Email me if you cannot get adequate help. If you are able, please respond to other student’s questions on this forum. I will make that a part of my evaluation at the end of the quarter.
April 20: I am looking at the craps programs and some still have issues. Make sure you see me and get help if this program is not working correctly. Remember the running of the program acts as an auto-grader. I will record you turned in the assignment, but I will also check the final program in your cubbie at the end of the course, so fix it up if it is not working. I will, however, be grading in great detail your competency programs. There I will be the computer, so your task is to be able to have the right logic and very close syntax to solve a problem similar to craps. Again, we will be using the problem area of managing a stack of test scores, which is actually very close to most of what programs do. Before long craps will seem trivial. Remember we will have our first read code competency tonight. We will also have about an hour for presentations and a half hour for Seminar, so be prepared and have 2 copies of your prep. See you tonight. Hope it is cooler..
April 19: In helping folks to this point there seems to be 2 big problems that are causing most of the issues. First, make sure you evolve your code. Do not add more than a few lines at a time and test each new entry multiple time to make sure it is working. Do NOT just continue on. You will get into the swamps very quickly. Second, you need to have a design to build your house. You need one for programming even more. You start from the English and translate to the JavaScript. For change, number guess, and craps you had English designs. I am seeing JavaScript programs that are not tied directly to the English. In fact, you should not deviate. If the English has just one while, your JavaScript will have just one, and in the same place. Same with If. In essence you are practicing the scientific method as you program. Your reality is the working program. You are trying to create new knowledge or advancement by conducting an experiment. Your experiment is adding a few new lines of code. When you design a scientific experiment the most important task is the limit the number of variables you are dealing with . Same with programming. Only add a few lines of code. You run your experiment by running your program. If it works, your hypothesis, based on what you think the existing program is doing, was correct. Save this. Now formulate another ‘experimental hypothesis’ and make a few new lines of code and make a prediction of what will happen. Run your experiment. If it does not work, revise your hypothesis and try again. When you get to the point you are guessing or using random trial and error you are thrashing. Time to get some help. Again, the help takes this form: I got the template running an examined it very carefully. I was able to get it to do (hopefully) a couple of new things. When I tried to get it to do X, whatever X is.. It did not work. Here is what I tried. I am not sure what to try next. The best first approach is to take your question to your study group or forum. If you are still stumped, email me. Get unstuck. Make sure that all of your programs in your cubbie are working. Go head and put the following programs in your cubbies now, and name them the following: formletter1.html, numberguess.html, craps.html, movie.html. change.html, formletter2.html.
April 18: You should all have an email from me with the grades from the Personal Website and from the button/textbox FormLetter2 that should have been in your cubbie. If you are deficient in your assignments, you will want to see me right away to get caught up. More importantly, you need to see me if you are having difficulties and cannot get your program to work. There were too many times I saw a non-working program in the cubbie, but there had been no questions about the program from the student first. This should never happen! The computer grades for you the assignment. You can always see if it works, you can see how well it works. Get help if you cannot get it to work. Some of you have done a good job with getting help. Everyone, however need to join the helping/getting help club. Your cubbie is your portfolio. Everything should be there and work. If not, get it to work by getting help. Also, we are going to be starting Presentations tonight. If you are ready tonight and would like to go early, please see me before class. Remember to limit your talk to between 3 and 5 minutes, with some time after that for questions. You will be able to use the overhead display. Put any programs you want to display in your cubbie or the workspace.
April 16: A couple of tips on TTT from email questions. First, make sure you follow the process of making just one small addition to each working program. If you fall victim to writing a bunch of lines of code without testing, you lose the ability to be certain WHERE your problem lies. That is the toughest part of fixing a program, knowing where.. Again, I would suggest using the alert statement to stop the execution during a run to let you know where you are in the program. For example, if you have an if statement that is checking if there is an 0 in position, say, 4, and an 0 in position 5, and you want to put an x in position 6 if that is so, then in your if that is checking this, as the first line following the opening { , write: alert(” an 0 in position 4 and 6:”) If you see this alert when you run, you know where you are in the program, and that you have successfully entered the if statement. The biggest problem with the TTT code is to make sure that for every move you only satisfy one if therefore only place one X on the board. If you have 2 alerts for a move, that is evidence you have not done this correctly. Look at it and see if you can find the error. Get help once you run out of ideas, but not before that. Be ready to explain what you have tried and what you are thinking about what you want to do with a line or 2 of code. Also, when using the && or the || conditions, you must repeat a comparison. for example.. if ( x == 4 || x > 8) would work. If (x== 4 || 7) would not.
April 15: I posted an initial help post to the TTT Help forum. This was a reply to an email. It is very important to get off the ground on ApTTT. It is not easy, but it is absolutely doable. There is an answer to your questions. Again, make sure you TTT Template code is working. Try to fix the bug when the player moves first to position 4 and the next x is in position 7 when it should be in position 3. If you can describe what you want to do in English, you are most of the way there. Do not let it go, however. Talk about it in study groups. Check out the QUASAR. Use the TTT Help forum. Email each other or me. The one prerequisite, however, it to be able to say what you have tried and what you think is going on. Just giving you an answer is worthless, especially since you will need to be able to do both the reading of code and writing of code yourself for the competencies.
April 14: I added the Number Guess program to the To Do list. You can just put this program in your cubbie, and call it numberguess.html so I can find it. I will be emailing you about your Personal Website and FormLetter2 in a few days. I have noticed that the Coding Help and TTT Help forums are empty. I know many of you are in study groups, but also use these forums for help, and if you are feeling confident please check them to see if you can help. Again, email me if you cannot get unstuck. At the same time, start and finish early. It is a very bad idea to have a deadline on getting your program working. A program is often 90% done 90% of the time. It is hard to know when you fix that last problem. Plus, you run out of time to get help. Make sure you are practicing the Read Code competency.
April 13: When you are working on the Number Guess program, make sure you have the second template program up and running. Always return to your working program if a change you made does not work, and make very very small changes. Save each new version, but keep the previous one. Your task is to change the English to JavaScript, mostly one line at a time. You had some time in class for this task, but if you are stuck part-way through the process, let’s limit your time to an hour on finishing it up. Turn in what you have, so I can see that you have done, but also do this: State where you are stuck and what you have tried to solve the problem. We will talk about your problem in class, and you can fix it and resubmit next Monday. At the save time, you must also have tried the Craps program and similarly find if/where you are stuck. This one is not due, but it is your chance to ask question. That is a missed opportunity if you have not struggled through it a bit. I have added a new Forum called Coding Help. I posted a reply to an email question on this forum about Number Guess. You can go here to ask your own question, but email me directly if you need my help. Remember.. no thrashing. You should look very carefully at the code you have, make a reasoned and educated guess as to what you might try next. Make sure it is a very small step. If you are correct, save this as a new version (keep the old) and continue. If not, try to make sense of where it is wrong. Once you are out of ideas, you are thrashing and it is time to get help. You should, however, be able to say 3 things.. here is what I have figured out. This is where I am stuck.. Here is what I have tried to get unstuck.
April 12: I neglected to point out last night that the Movie Program is due on Wednesday. Turn in a paper copy of the program, and on the back finish the decision table that is started for you on the link for the April 6 class. Remember, with the Number Guess program, you are working from the English on the April 11 class link. The hard part, by far, is to get the right expression in the while statement. As we said in class, try different choices. You have and and or options ( && , || ) and you have 2 comparisons to worry about- if they got the guess correct and if the counter is too high. Try what make sense to you. See if it works. Test it. Try again. Email me or others if you get stuck. I will be checking your final version of your Personal Website after class tomorrow. Make sure you have all if your files in your cubbie in a folder called Personal Website. Test it. Make sure it works. Your starting program should be index.html. If you do not have a working program, make sure you email me with this fact. Don’t forget to come with your Seminar Prep before class. Again, you can print it out in class. Do not have more than one sheet, front and back. Finally, I put a new forum up for getting help on Tic Tac Toe. Come with questions in class, but also try out this form of help. I will also answer questions on Craps, so try to make progress on this program before class tomorrow.
April 11: I have been getting some questions on the Change and Movie program. That is a good thing. You cannot be successful programming unless you practice the process, which is to make sure you have a working program, try to make a small change, see if that works, and if it does, then go on to the next step (ie dimes for change or another set of conditions for Movie). If your first try does not work, then go back to the working program, analyse your last try and see if you can figure a different solution. When you run out of things that might work, then get some help, from others or from me. Make sure, however, that you tell me all of your trials and your initial efforts. I (or you if you are helping) do not just want to give the answer because the problem is in the process, not just the result. Having said that, in most of the programs, if you can get one step you can get the others.. if you can figure quarters you can figure dimes. If you can find the price for students with a coupon on wednesday you have a good chance to figure the price of a ticket for an adult with a coupon but not on wednesday. Remember, you will need to do the programming process on your own for the competencies. We will be to that point very soon, so that it is very important that you can read and write code on your own. We are just at the warm-up stage now. The point we are making, however, is that if you can explain anything unambiguously you can program a computer to model or do that process.
April 10: Remember, as you finish up your Change program, if you are off by one penny in your change do not worry about it. There is a fix for the JavaScript rounding error, but it is not necessary. Also, remember to print out the listing, but also have the English instruction you hopefully started with printed on the back of the listing. Remember also that these instructions should just be input, output, and a series of calculations. You can include mod. Make sure you follow our procedure for working on the programs. Get the sample program up and running. Then make the smallest change possible you can think of. If that works, then save your new working program as, say, change2.html, and try another small improvement. Evolve your program. I have talked to some of you online, but that is a resource you should try. I have about 10 folks on my list. You should see me online with a green dot in gchat. If you need help, email me. We can also talk or video chat on gchat. Get the help you need and do not thrash.
April 7: Please make this change to our discussion last night. I am still having trouble with running some of your Personal Websites. In class, I asked you to email me with a link when your program is ready. PLEASE DO NOT. Instead, I will let you work on your website until next Wednesday, April 13. If you do not have your program in your cubbie and working by this date, you need to email me this fact by April 13. Make sure you make a folder in your cubbie called Personal Website. Put your files in this folder. Use the name index.html as your starting program. Check your program by running it during class. Also, make sure you have formletter2.html in your cubbie, but not in the Personal Website folder. I will check this program also. This gives you a week to make sure the programs are working and solving any problems. If you are having difficulties, you must email me before (preferably well before) April 13 to keep me posted on your difficulties and problems, and to get help. If I hear from you, we can work out an extension if need be.
April 5 #2: I have recorded your email, About Me, Form Letter, and Seminar #1 papers. I have a few students who have not come to class or left early, and have not contacted me about missing. Please be aware that, as per the Covenant, this will result in a loss of credit. I will not contact you if you miss, but it is recorded. You must contact me soon if you have missed all or part of a class and work out a make-up. If I do not hear from you within a week or two from the time you miss, you will lose that option. Please do not push this. It is a shame to start out on the wrong foot. I do keep track of your participation. I am willing to work with you, but you must also work with me. For the large majority of you all, nice job and keep up the good work!
April 5: We have been too busy to watch the Kurzweil video the last 2 class sessions. We will try to squeeze that in tomorrow. Make sure when you prepare for the Shermer seminar you include some questions as part of your paper that you want to ask your group, based on the reading. Between the 5 of you, you should have a good start for many discussions.
April 4: #2 Make sure you scroll down on this page to make sure you have seen all the latest entries. Just a reminder: make sure everything on the To Do list for today is done before class. In this case, you need a copy of your birthday form letter, and a copy for me as well as for you for your Seminar Prep for Kurzweil. I will check your email and About Me entry tomorrow. I do check off every requirement, so make sure you do lose credits by having holes.
April 4: Hope you all had a great weekend and enjoyed the sun! I was gone for a couple of days, so I apologize for not updating or getting back to emails right away. Please add me to your gchat list of contacts. I am online with my gmail address (avecandc16@gmail.com) frequently, and you can catch my via appointment with questions via email. Make sure you come with your page of preparation on the Kurzweil text, pages 1-34. You will turn in one copy to me before seminar, and have the other during your seminar discussion. Do NOT get behind on your assignments, as it will have credit consequences very quickly. You also have a paper copy of your program to turn in today, the one that is an alteration of the form letter program we did in class, pertaining to a birthday party. You can print a copy for me in the lab from Notepad if you like. I will be checking off your email and About Me assignments on Tuesday, after you should all be squared away with registration. Make sure you are thinking deeply about where you see yourself employed in 5 to 10 years. You will be doing some research on that field, and the affect of computer technology on that field as a presentation. You should have as a minimum 5 resources you cite. Please begin that process. You will be making a forum entry this week on your chosen topic.
March 29: Congrats on checking this page. Make sure you do so at least every other day, if not more often. Again, here is where I post new info for the class. If you need to contact me, use the avecandc16@gmail.com email. I have received emails from about half of you. Make sure you stay up on all of the To Do list requirements, and be sure to scroll down in this message list in case you missed one. Let me know if you are having trouble with the About Me forum entry.
March 28. I will post messages on this home page every few days. Check here often, at least every 2-3 days. Scroll down for earlier messages. Each message will have its date. This page is where I will communicate with the whole class. Do not miss vital messages.
