Final Blog Post of the Year!

When I first entered the class in August I really didn’t know what to expect out of it. The first six weeks was kind of easy because we didn’t really do any kind of programming. All we would do were group activities that were mostly puzzles and I really liked the fact that they were in groups. The computer-buying project was something that was really cool and I enjoyed doing because I got a 91 on it. Also the TED talks we would watch in class were really cool.

            The first time we did some kind of programming was with the HTML/CSS project. In this project we had to build our own website using the codes that go along with HTML and CSS. In the beginning I was confused on what to do and I spent a whole day just doing nothing because I didn’t know what to do. After getting some help from other teammates I finally figured out how to use HTML and CSS and my website was on a soccer team called Real Madrid.

            When scratch rolled around the corner, I was really getting the hang of it. I thought that the first few labs were easy. As time went on though they actually became harder and I was really having trouble with them. I thought that the quizzes over Scratch weren’t hard it’s just that I didn’t pay attention to the questions on the quiz.

            When it was time to do Jeroo, I was lost in the first labs and I didn’t know what to do. It took me at least 30 minutes just to figure out how to do the first lab, 1A. I got some help from some classmates and after a while I started to understand what to do. I finished all the labs that need to be finished and I retook all the quizzes up to 70’s.

            The second semester rolled around and I really didn’t know what to expect from the programming language that we were going to learn, which was Python. The first day back we had a presentation over the simple things in Python and it seemed easy at first. I would later find out that I was wrong.

            The first three labs were really easy because we really didn’t have to program anything in Python; all we had to do was copy and paste the code that Mr. Stephens gave us. As time went on, we had more and more labs and each lab would be harder than the last.

The first five labs, I believe, were preparing us for our first project with Python and I thought that this project shouldn’t have been so hard. I had finished the first TODO in the first class period that we were given to work on the project and from there I just neglected the project! Mr. Stephens gave us at least three weeks to work on this project and two out of those three weeks were just spent doing nothing and not working on the project at all. On the day that it was due, I just continued to work on it the entire class period and somehow I got it finished and received a 92.  

            After that project we started to work with a robot named the Finch and we used the same codes as in Python to program the robot to do several things, like move in a straight line, move in circles, and light up different colors. I thought that this was pretty cool and that we should have spent more time on the Finch but after about a week of pure Finch we went back to Python.

            We did a couple of more labs with Python that involved dictionaries and tuples and strings, and I got kind of confused. Something that I did not like was that now labs were worth 40% of our grade, which meant that if you didn’t finish a lab, you’re grade was going to be hurt.

            We had to do another project and I actually worked on this one the entire time that we were given. I worked very diligently and when I finished the project I received an 80. My graph would not work so that’s probably where I lost most of points.

            Our final is going to be to design an Android app using the app maker and for this we are going to use our knowledge that we acquired from Scratch and use it to program our app. I am not really nervous about this final because I was pretty good with Scratch.

            This year in computer programming I learned a lot of stuff about different programming languages and many different things about computers and I thank Mr. Stephens for sharing his knowledge with us and for teaching us about computer programming.