First Quarter Assignment

1. How well did you meet your original goals for your project this quarter? Please be ''specific''. What were your original goals? What did you actually accomplish? How do these compare? Why?

I believe I did fairly well completing my goals for the quarter. My original goal was to learn the C language to the best of my ability. The brief one hour class periods didn't allow me to learn as much as i would have liked but still allowed me to get a firm grasp of the basics of the language. What I actually accomplished is, from no prior knowledge of the language, to have worked through the first chapter of the C Programming Language book and the majority of the second chapter. I had hoped to work through this language a little faster but am fairly pleased with my progress, especially in recent weeks.

2. Did your project turn out the way you planned? What unexpected things did you encounter during the quarter?

For the most part the project turned out as I planned. The most unexpected things i faced was the complexity of the C book I was using, and the expectation of prior knowledge it was built on. It was far more in depth when dealing with memory and often dealt less with actual programming.

3. What did you learn this quarter?

This quarter i learned the basic structure of C programming, along with the functions of several libraries and how to access them. These libraries include and

4. What can you do now that you couldn't do when you started?

I can now write programs in C which can solve a variety of problems and do many basics tasks. I have yet to write any programs of any real complexity but can generally write a long, simple program to accomplish basically the same thing.

5. What things did you hope to do that you can't do yet?

I hoped to get further into the C book and deal with longer and more complex programs. I especially wanted to learn enough useful programming to be able to get an internship working as a programmer. I know I am not even close to having this extent of expertise, but will continue to work towards this goal.

6. Will you continue with this project next quarter? Why or why not?

So far I am undecided whether to continue with C in class, or work with Java. I'm going to do some research over this weekend and try to determine which will be more useful in my professional life. If I continue with C I'll keep working on the C Programming book along with several online tutorials and most likely at least one other book from the classroom. If I switch to Java, or a different language, I'll request a book on the subject and most likely consult an online tutorial as well.

Scratch

I'm still finishing the scratch project but im on the verge of completing it, at least to the current specifications. The program asks you how many bats there are and responds to the user input correctly every time.

10-29-09

I spent the entire period working on the scratch program that Mr Elkner asked me to try. Its almost done, all i have left is to have the game not start until the person chooses the correct number of bats and add in a background and maybe some sounds.

10-27-09

The class period ended yesterday before I had a chance to post in my blog so I'm posting it now: I started on Scratch yesterday. When asked to create a version of the fly counting game where the number of flies is random I had the idea to use the random number generator. It creates a random number, either 0 or 1, and shows the sprite if the number is one.

Previous Code

Here is the aforementioned Code which converts lower case letters to binary. I'll clean this up and find a way to write a function that will hopefully accomplish this with much less code. http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfbtpmh3_3dnkgvn4m
I read over most of chapter 2 today and looked at some of the exercises for chapter three.

Text to Binary

Once again I spent the period working on exercises from the C Programming Language book. I've been struggling with a few of the exercises from the end of the first chapter but I'm confident that i can work it out soon. I also still had trouble copying the program i made from vim to google documents but will work on that.

Technical Trouble

I worked on a single program for the whole period. I'm making an English to Binary translater in C. Thus far the translater only converts lower case letters, but, given more time, I could easily have it convert upper case letters and numbers, as well as any special characters I choose. When trying to publish this code on a google document I ran into some trouble. I had it all but solved just as I had to leave for the bus and will post said code tomorrow.