Back at Develop

We came back today after one week off. It was a nice break from college and I managed to finish assignment two however I did not start assignment three. I am pretty confident with assignment two but I will be doing some changes tonight and I will proof read it.

The starter activity today was to ask how many days in the week there is and ask the user to enter the seven days of the week then print them. The trick behind this program was to make it with a loop. I didn't really understand loops but I managed to work it out in the end. The array confused me and still did after John showed us what to do.

After that we started to work on assignment one changes and assignment two. As I have finished assignment two I started working on assignment one. I like Johns way of marking because he talks and you can listen to it what I prefer over reading the comments. I managed to finish task one and task two and I will finish task three tomorrow or on Wednesday.

Also we had a practice with flow charts. I was pretty confident with flow charts however I do still get confused sometimes when creating them. This task helped me get more practice with flow charts and I am understanding them more now. I normally get confused over what box to use but now I do understand it more and I will start doing the flow charts soon for my final program.

Blog star!

It was tutorial time again today! So that means we learnt a new function in Small Basic. Today we had to make it to enter five peoples names and enter their score. This was quite an easy starter however the extension was more interesting. We had to use an array for the five people to enter their name and their score. I did not understand how to use an array so I did not understand the extension. John put an example of how to use an array up on the board for this example. My program was about 30 lines of code without the array and Johns code was about 8 lines with an array. It shows that using an array is more efficient compared to storing the information in all of the different variables.

After the tutorial we carried on doing assignment two/three. As I had finished off assignment three task one, I carried on doing my PowerPoint for assignment two task one what I finished about 20 minutes ago. I got a bit confused on rigidity, fragility and immobility because it was hard to find definitions on these terms. Overall I am pretty confident with the rest of the PowerPoint and I think I have done it right.

We also went over task two of assignment three. It seems quite straight forward however the pseudo code is my weakness. Luckily we only have to write the main parts of the code in pseudo code such as the calculations. I will aim to write most of them over the half term so I can get started on my program after half term. Also we found out the blog stars who were, Adam, Ben and myself (hence the title).

Overall this week has been very interesting and I have learnt a lot of new parts to programming and more key terms. In the week off I am going to aim to write some of the pseudo code and maybe some flow charts. Also I will practice my programming skills at home so I don't forget what to do.

Quiz day

We started the day off with the quiz! Sadly we did not do a little Small Basic tutorial because I enjoy them and learning more code. The quiz was very interesting. The video was about how you could use a sensor to control this machine. They used their hands to make the block stick up and it looked like their hands under it. The quiz questions were very hard and I don't see how people got 6/10. That just surprised me compared to my amazing score of 2/10! Surprisingly I did not come last.

After the quiz we started a team activity. We were given the information about the task and in our tables we had to design the pseudo code and the flow chart. I was in the flowchart team because I am more confident with flowcharts compared of pseudo code. In the end our table won what we were pleased with. I am getting more confident with my flow chart drawing and pseudo code for assignment three.

We also started learning about assignment three and what we had to do for it. This included trying out some of the programs what students made last year. We had to try and break them what was fun. The fifth program I put in some random letters in the post code bit and it started looping a message saying "Please enter your postcode" or something a long the lines like that. There was no way of typing while it was looping like that. Assignment three is two tasks what are the specification and the creation of the program. We made notes of the assumptions, inputs, outputs and processes of what we were going to put in our specification. I finished my notes and then designed the specification so I can start designing my program now. I will finish off assignment two first then I will design the program what will be fun.

Overall I am happy with what I have learnt today and I can't wait to start coding the program. Hopefully I wont make the mistakes like the other people did last year and hopefully it works. They are my main two goals to my program.

Deadlines and a new assignment

Today's Small Basic tutorial was to print information to a .txt file. We had to ask for the name and their address then print it to a .txt file into our documents. I had a look at the tutorial on how to do it and it seemed quite easy. I had a little problem with saving the file because I forgot to put the name of the file in the file path. The next part of the task was to use yesterdays code and make that print to the same document. I found that quite easy to do because it was the same as the code before. Here is an example of how I saved the name and address to a text document.

After that we carried on working on assignment one. The deadline is today and I have finished my work nearly. I have one little bit left to do then I have done it. I started off finishing off task one and starting task two before break. After break we moved onto assignment two (I will explain that later) and did some more of assignment one. At the end of the lesson before lunch, I managed to finish off task two and nearly finish task three. I am happy with the progress I have made and I will be sending it off later when I get home.

We started to learn about assignment two today. There are two tasks for this and I am feeling pretty confident with them both. The first task is about the software development cycle (SDLC) what is quite interesting. We have to discuss the two main types of life cycles what are Waterfall and Agile. I am confident with it and have made quite a bit of progress with task one. I have done the introduction and explained the Waterfall stages.

Overall I have learnt a lot today and I am excited for working on assignment two. Hopefully I have done enough for assignment one and pass that. I am going to practice my Small Basic skills more tomorrow and experiment more.