Substitute teacher

Today was another day with a substitute teacher, and I think she had an easy day. Since we were all working on our substring assignments, she didn't have to really do anything except supervise us.

Anyways, I'm currently on my fifth substring assignment. It's starting to get trickier as I progress, mainly because of the fact that now I need to change certain letters, not just parts of the word.

We are going to have our test in ICS soon, which doesn't make me too nervous. I think I have pretty much everything down, except for the little things. The mistakes I'll make are probably going to be from small syntactical errors, which is what I'm trying to improve by working harder on my assignments.

Today was a pretty calm day, and nothing other than that happened. I was the student host, but all I really had to do was help some of the kids open the blinds. With that in mind, I say bye for now!

Piano!

Today in ICS Tasfia and I were given a special assignment! To create a piano, using Turing. This would replace our repetition assignment 13, so I thought it would be fun and simple to do!

So far there are a few problems with my piano, like how you can't press two keys at once to make any kind of harmony. Unfortunately for me, people on the internet say it's something you can't change while trying to improve a piano program in Turing.

We will all be finished our repetition assignments tomorrow, so I'm looking forward to it.

Bye for now!

Happy birthday Mr. Arkin!

Since it was Mr.Arkin's birthday today, we all received lollipops! After that we went back to work, with only our final repetition assignment in front of us. After that we will be starting substrings, which I am pretty excited about!

Today was probably the most unproductive flash club day ever, considering the fact that nobody actually worked with any code. It was more like play day.
Well, while we were in flash club, Zelin and I opened up Turing. Zelin showed me some of his cool programs, where you can draw things with the keyboard! We were thinking about making some kind of tiny game, but we needed to learn collision first. We found a program teaching collision, where a box would travel to another box and stop once they touched. Instead of learning anything from it, we went straight to changing the code. In the end we created an effect where the box would bounce of the second one! It was pretty cool, but if we had more time we would've made it a lot more amazing.

Well, today was actually a pretty slow day compared to normal. I learned that I misuse the word "pretty" a lot, just like in the previous sentence. Unfortunately, that's one part of incorrect grammar that is going to stay a part of my speech patterns and idioms. As I was saying, nothing much happened. So... bye for now!

The final stretch

As we worked on our assignments today I couldn't help but think at how much we've learned in just a couple of months. I didn't even know that Turing existed, and I didn't even think it was possible to write programs with free software. Anyways, the class is on the final stretch of this assignment marathon. Another thing that I've been thinking about is a little bit more scary. At the end of all these assignments, there has to be some kind of super assignment to wrap it all up. The substring section doesn't seem to difficult, so I have a feeling it isn't that. Maybe it might be some program that is an index to our other programs! It would take an enormous chunk of code to create something that huge, that branched inside of itself into over 30 different programs. If that happened, I would just explode. I know we would already have all the programs done, but can you imagine the loops necessary?! It would be crazy!

On a different topic, my final product of my race car game in flash club is coming together! Slowly but surely, I have all the elements of code I need. All I need now is to piece them together, and possibly find a better way to decelerate.
The sad thing is that I might have to start missing flash club on Wednesdays, but that is a big might.

Well, that's all the computer-related things that happened to me today, so bye for now!

Turing Font!

Today in ICS was the day that our printer assignments were due. I 'm not quite sure how I did, but I'm going to find out tomorrow. We also had to hand in our eighth repetition assignment. I think mine worked pretty well, it guarded against everything except for different data types.

Anyways, I found out the most amazing thing today! I was looking up how to center text on Turing, when I found a forum discussing fonts. When I copied down the code, it was really quite cool! I'm pretty sure that Turing uses every single font that Microsoft Word 2007 has, but I've only tried two so far. From now on I'm going to use a different font for the header of my assignments instead of just putting a different background around some spaced-out uppercase text!

Today I was thinking about all the interesting things I've found in Turing, and I've decided that I'm going to create a new discussion on Wikispaces about cool things to do in Turing. It isn't just all homework! One of the coolest things I've found was in the Introduction to Programming in Turing on Touque. It was a program where a ball of colour would appear wherever you clicked! I tried fiddling around with it, but all I could do was change the size of the ball. Another interesting thing I found was a way to use "play" in the background of a program. Normally if you used "play" and then used the keyword "put", it would wait for the play to finish before inputting the data. Using a keyword "fork", it can change everything! I  have a few more, but I'm going to save them for the discussion on Wikispaces.

Anyways, bye for now! Don't forget to check the newest discussion form on November 23!

Coffee time?

There is some question on why this post is coming at 11:56 p.m.
All I can say is that McDonald's was giving away free coffee.

Anyways, I managed to finish my 10th assignment for repetition today, which I thought was really quite outstanding. It wasn't as good as my 9th one, but it guards against all conditions (of the same data type).

In class today we desk checked a partners assignment 6, and then analyzed their code. After that we went on the computers to make revisions to our codes, and then worked on other assignments. After a while I finally understood how the keyword "mod" was used for assignment 8. I noticed that quite a few people had problems with it, but I'm sure they should all figure it out by tomorrow.

After school today my new printer finally arrived! It's a scanner, a fax machine, a xerox machine and a printer all in one! I printed out my first sheet of paper coming from my house for the first time in six years. It was really mesmerizing, just staring as the sheet rolled into my hands.

Another thing that happened in room 218 was another exciting day in flash club! We had to create a car that moved in every direction, without using code from the website. When I said I already had done this, they didn't believe me. Once they had seen my code and how unsophisticated it was, they realized that it was the work of a 14-year-old. As I mentioned before, Turing and Flash have a lot of similarities in the code. They have loops, if statements, and much more.

Anyways, that's all that happened today! I mean yesterday. This dragged past midnight, so I better go get some sleep! Bye for now!

Finishing up repetition!

Today in ICS we continued working on our repetition assignments. I'm currently on the tenth assignment, and I realized that if I wanted to make my program as excellent as it could be I would have to use a lot of loops. I ended up having a loop inside of a loop inside of another loop. It got quite confusing, but in the end it worked just as it was supposed to.

I think we now know quite a bit of Turing, so every assignment we do has to be as good as we can make them. The hardest part would be making sure that every different input has the correct outcome, and guarding against invalid inputs.

We found out today that only two other people than me had entered a message for the school's time capsule, which is pretty sad. When they open up the capsule later on, they might wonder why nobody wanted to greet the people of the future. At least I got my message through, and that's all that matters.

That's all that happened today, so bye for now!

Play some music!

Today in ICS we learned about a couple of functions called "whatcol" and "whatrow" and a function called "play". "Whatcol" and "whatrow" are used to identify the location of the cursor. The function "play" is probably the coolest function we have used so far. Using it, you can play music! You can either write down the music as a string "a,b,c,d,e,f,g," or you can use a file outside of the program. Unfortunately the version of Turing we are using doesn't support mp3 format, so if you want to use a song from your computer you will need to convert it into a wav file or a mid file.

In class we had to analyze another code given to us, and once we were finished we headed over to the computers to work on our repetition assignments.

Well, that's all that happened today, so bye for now!

Another Friday!

This week went by extremely fast, but I hope things slow down on the weekend.

Our homework for the weekend was to finish repetition assignments one and two. I'm not sure if there was something else, but if there is I'll check it tomorrow.

In class today we continued learning about loops. We focused today on showing the importance of how the keyword "exit"'s position determines how the program runs. We are supposed to keep it right after a variable changes. Even though we can place it somewhere else and still possibly get the same results, it's just easier and more organized to keep it right after the variable is changed.

Today was also another day at flash club! We learned about arrays, but I think I'm just going to try and finish project formula 1 before testing how arrays work. I've noticed a lot of similarities between Turing and Flash, which is pretty interesting.

That's all that happened today, so bye for now!

Another day in ICS

Today in ICS was just like a regular day, just like any other. For homework, we had to make sure we had our parents sign our tests and bring them back the next day.

We also took up our first program that used accumulators and counters, and I did a pretty good job. I may have complicated my program a little too much, but it executes the way I want it to which is mainly what matters to me.

Today was also remembrance day so we had an assembly in the morning, as well as a moment of silence at 11:00 a.m.

The day was spent mostly on reviewing the errors we made in our tests, and working on the model answers for each question.

Unfortunately that was all that happened today, so bye for now!

First Programming Test!

Today we had our first programming test, and it wasn't too difficult. Unfortunately I didn't remember to study the flow charts so the first question was the hardest for me.

The test took up the entire period, so I guess I can talk about flash club today!

In flash club we continued working on a racing game, and I finally made one of the race cars. I still don't have any boundaries or even a background, so it isn't quite finished yet. I'm hoping to make the car be able to accelerate, because that would make it feel a lot smoother.

That was pretty much my entire day in the room 218 today, so bye for now!

Accumulators and Counters!

 As you can see in the title, we learned about accumulators and counters today! We also introduced a new section, called the initialization section. This way we can have the program keep track of the number of loops that have passed by, as well as some other cool things!

 Tomorrow we are having a test on programming, which makes me a little scared. I'm not sure how long it's going to be, but I guess I'm going to find out first thing tomorrow!

It is also the birthday of Mozilla Firefox! There has already been two other computer-rated people that were born on November, which is pretty weird to think about. Anyways, I'm sure Firefox has come a long way since it was first released!

Well, bye for now!

Analyze that code!

Today in ICS we spent most of the time working on a poster intended for analyizing the code of a model solution to selection assignment 6 in Turing. This ended up taking the entire day, and yet none of us were able to finish by the end of the period.

Today was quite a static day, considering we only worked on one thing.
Since that's all that happened, bye for now!

Computer gone again...

Unfortunately the man who fixed our computer removed all of the Microsoft office programs, so once again I am forced to blog on the tiny screen of an iPod.

Anyways, today in class we had to desk check the code of a Turing assignment. It took some people in the class a little longer than others, but we finally finished desk checking the entire program. In class it seemed like we were about to do some project, but we ended up spending so much time desk checking that we weren't able to start today.

Tomorrow is a Friday! I'm not quite sure if anybody has taken the initiative to creating the playlist for tomorrow, which is unfortunate.

As you may know, it is rather difficult to type on an iPod. That in mind, bye for now!

The most tedious day ever.

Today was extremely exhausting, since my friend Eishan and I spent most the entire day organizing files for the Radisson hotel downtown. It sounded cool at first, but organizing that many files in alphabetical order can really drain a person's energy. Over the span of eight hours, we went through at least 5000 files, 50 loose sheets of papers, and ten different filing cabinets. The letter "C" was the most ridiculous to organize. It took up one and a half of the 10 filing cabinets that were used to store every letter of the alphabet. Who would have Even though this may sound boring (which it was) we still managed to have a lot of fun at the hotel. My mom showed us the best suite in the hotel, which was actually on the third floor.

In between those work periods, we got to see the different departments in the hotel such as the housekeeping department and the sales department. We also went to the staff room! It didn't have the best food, but nobody was complaining. There was some white rice with peas, salad with dressing, chicken pieces and some vegetables. Eishan and I ended up coming back to the staff room a lot to escape the filing cabinet that somehow never stopped producing more work for us, and we found that there were a few coffee machines. Those coffee machines helped us survive today, and made it possible for us to organize each and every file in alphabetical order.

We also got to work on Microsoft Excel to help fill in some numbers for their 2010/2011 budget. It felt like a pretty important job, so I was glad we were there to help.

After all our hard work, we were rewarded with some delicious candy. Those jelly beans made all the work worthwile!

That's all for today, so bye for now!

Take your kids to work day!

        Tomorrow is definitely going to be a fun day because of  "Take your kids to work day", where we get to follow our parents to work! My friend and I are going to be following my mom to her hotel, where we get to spend the day working! We'll be helping clean the rooms that guests have stayed in, and we might also get to work at the front desk!

      For homework today we had to complete a program that simulated an ATM machine. Instead of using only if statements, we are going to be using case statements as well. Using case statements we'll be able to condense the amount of coding that goes into the program, and display the same results. I'm pretty excited about case statements, because I think it will help us make more complex programs a lot easier to code!

     Other than that today was a rather slow day, so nothing much really happened. We learned about case statements, and we also had a sneak preview of repetition assignments. Fortunately for me, I'm already finished five of my repetition assignments, so there wasn't anything too difficult about today's class.

    Well, that's pretty much all that happened today. Bye for now!

Enter new statement!

A case statement! Something you might not know about, until now. As shown in the daily log, a case statement can be used if there are to many alternatives in an if statement. This keeps the same result, except in a much more concise format. Now that you know what a case statement is, we can move on!

This paragraph is going to be a little bit more personal than usual. I'm pretty excited for the rest of the week, since tomorrow will be a late start, followed by Take Your Kids To Work day, and then Thursday. I don't know what's so good about Thursday, but I take it as a reminder saying "the weekend is near!", which definitely makes me feel good.

Today in class we worked on making the best possible solution for every selection assignment. This was a project we did in groups, so we were able to combine our ideas and assignments to make one super assignment! Coming up with the best solution was difficult at times, considering everybody in my group had a different approach to the question. Other than finding the best solution to each assignment, we also learned that there are many different ways to create the same result.

I'm not quite sure what the Turing clean-up is, but I'm assuming it is what we were working on in class today. Other than that there wasn't any new homework, but we still need to stay alert for a new quiz may come up at any time.

That's all for today, so bye for now!