January 30, 2008 Number Systems
At first glance I was extremely tentative with learning the new ways of counting. After I opened my mind a bit and began to think outside the box the different counting systems started making perfect sense. When adding and subtracting in octal and hex I sometimes forget that the numbers are actually in decimal form and I try adding for example 13+5 and say that it equals 18. I forget that 13 is a different number in decimal. After some practice I began to get the pattern down and now seem to be quite comfortable with counting, adding and subtracting.
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February 3, 2008 Dreamewaver Chapters 1,2,6, and 7
Reading these chapters was extremely informative and helped me a great deal to first acquire a good background of using Dreamweaver and then provided a great deal of examples of differences between writing in simply HTML or using a program such as Dreamweaver. At first I was a little confused as to what a “form” was but after a little more reading it was clearly spelled out.
Dreamweaver Chapters 3,4,5,and 8
At first the idea of “forms” was extremely confusing to me but after reading the entire section and practicing with Dreamweaver it became very clear. The possibility of being able to add a photo album to my web site is pretty awesome. Eventually I think I will add a photo album to my About Me page. The other interesting section I found was about bells and whistles and to be wary when using them, so as to not complicate your page.
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Boolean Algebra
Boolean Algebra was very, very intimidating at the start. Adding and subtracting the numbers wasn’t too bad but the concepts and applying them to computers was a bit unclear. I don’t understand how we would be able to use these algebrean concepts and apply them to computer programming.
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Alice Chapters 1 and 2
Before reading this book, I was extremely nervous about computer programming. I had the same stereotype against programmers that it talked about in the beginning of Chapter 1. Fortunately, the reading was extremely easy to follow and understand. The concept of being able to instruct the computer to make a 3D object move and have animation, without actually writing the HTML script is awesome! The tips in these chapters were really interesting; especially the concepts of the bounding box and the different directional ways the objects are able to move, because of their 3D quality.
Alice Chapter 4
Chapter 4 was a very interesting chapter and made the parts of Alice much easier to understand. I finally understood what the terms world level method and class level method were referring to and I learned how to create parameters. Parameters are extremely helpful and efficient, saving much time and energy. One interesting aspect of this chapter was the opacity tip and technique when dealing with underwater objects.
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Alice Chapter 5
I really like the idea of being able to trigger different events by using different inputs. This could be extremely helpful in creating video games, if needing to use mouse and keyboard controls to for example move in different directions, jump, fight, or pick objects up. These different features are falling into place now and are painting a clear picture of how different animations or games can be created.
Alice Chapter 6
This chapter WAS extremely informative. Although very intimidating at the start, by the end of the chapter I came to understand the purpose of using If/else commands. The aircraft examples in the book made the concepts very clear. Being able to make an expression with a certain condition (if one is above the other, vice versa) seems to be very helpful in animating objects in video game type animations.
Alice Chapter 7
This chapter was extremely easy to understand, considerably easier than the previous chapter. The techniques learned were very helpful and are very useful. Using loops seems to make repeating actions much easier than simply rewriting code over and over.
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Alice Chapter 8
The conept of recursion was a little intimidating at first but after the two hands on activities done in class (coin activity and stand up activity), the concept was much clearer. I think this technique proves to be extremely helpful. When you have a specific formula of actions and you have different objects that need to perform this specific function, recursion methods are specifically helpful in telling the object to return back to the function, and repeat.
Alice Chapter 9
Chapter 9 was especially easy. The concepts of lists and arrays were simple and when implementing them in Alice, I didn't find any problems. A list is a collection of items and items in a list all have the same type.
Alice Chapter 10
tThe sectios on variables proved to be very helpful. Being able to change and recall certain states and properties are going to be very helpful in creating my large project. I also found it very useful that class level variables can be saved out with the object and reused at a later time. I particularly like the idea of arrays, beign able to structure and organize a collection of elements. I'm having a bit of trouble understanding how to implement it but I hope to include it in my large project. |
