Agenda & Assignment 17, April 17

CSC 101/IMM 120

Spring 2009

Summary of Class Activities:

Rather than lull you all to sleep with a powerpoint lecture that overwhelms your cognitive load, I decided we would explore the remaining topics by encouraging to you to use your emerging computational thinking skills to research these environments yourselves. In class.

The purpose of this exercise is to reinforce to you that essential to computing is the skill to find tutorials that are appropriate to your individual learning style. Secondly, solving a problem in a group, even if it is just information gathering is essential to computational thinking.

As you do your assigned exercise below try to answer the following:

1) Is the language you are assigned hard or easy to read based on your experience with Processing and Scratch?

2) Do you think it is a programming language or a scripting language? Justify your answer.

3) Compare and contrast the features of your language with Processing. What can the language do that Processing can't?

We will do a count off by 3. You will have one hour to do the following. In the last 20 minutes of class you will do small group demos to the rest of the class.

Group 1 is to research the Flash/Actionscript environment. Check out the wikipedia pages (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actionscript and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash. Open up the Flash environment and find ONE small example that illustrates what you can do with Flash. Be prepared to show this to the rest of the class.

Goup 2 is to research Javascript. Check out the wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript There is a formidible piece of code at the bottom. See if you can figure out what it does. Check out the site: http://www.w3schools.com/JS/default.asp and pick one small example to show the class.

Group 3 is to research PHP. Check out the wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP. Google "learn PHP" pick one of the tutorials and find an example program that you can show to your classmates.

HOMEWORK

It is time to think about your final "choice" project. Be prepared on Tuesday to pitch your idea to Dr. Wolz. You may do something in

Processing (either a new project or extending your current one)

Flash/Actionscript (your project must have some programming logic in it.)

PHP (your project should involve capturing user input)

Javascript (your project should involve managing images of some sort)