Thursday: 1:14-2:30
Friday: 12:25-2:30
Our Hour of Code event at school went very well. We had students coming throughout the day to participate and learn about coding, and also a lot of kids who came to help the inexperienced if they had any trouble. Many times, we had every computer in our lab filled with students who had never tried computer science before. We also had a few teachers that came down to try the Hour of Code over their lunch break. One teacher even brought her entire class to come learn about computer science. I heard a lot of kids talking about how cool computer science was, and many got very excited about how well they could do the exercises without any experience and in only a half an hour of time. It was a really awesome learning experience for all who participated, and I think the event did a good job of raising awareness and interest in computer science.
On a less happy note, I found out during my internship period that AppFurnace has an outrageous publishing fee that is tacked onto the end even if you use the free version to develop the app. So, we are going to have to scrap the entire app that we have currently, and start looking into other options for development. This realization was good in some ways, because, as a team, we weren't very fond of the limitations AppFurnace put on us to begin with. However, the realization definitely put a damper on the chipper mood of our successful Hour of Code event.
I've been getting a lot of good organization and leadership skills lately. This week, I had to do some public speaking when I went on the announcements in front of the whole school and had to choose what I would say. This made me think a lot about how to motivate people to get involved and the best way to get people excited. I also got more experience with the preparation needed to get an event set up. Finally, this week I learned that you can never have enough planned. Even though I felt like we had taken a lot of time to think about how the app would be put together beforehand so that we could save ourselves struggles further along, we were still put in a situation where we will need to scrap a lot of hard work because of something we looked over in the planning stages. Despite our impatience, we should have hashed out the details of all of our options for the app before we started coding. However, not everything can be thought of in the planning stages, so it is important to be able to jump the hurdles in a project when they come up.
Sunday, December 14, 2014
December 8-10
Monday: 1:14-2:30
Tuesday: 1:14-2:30
Wednesday: 1:14-2:30
This week was National Computer Science week, so I spent a lot of time getting our school involved in the festivities. Byte Club's advisor had the idea to have a computer science event on Friday of this week to introduce new people to computer science and raise the interest school-wide. She suggested that we give out passes to the computer science students she has now and let those students pick a friend of theirs that didn't know how to code to let them skip the class that the experienced student had their computer science class to come and learn with hourofcode.com. So, this week I spent a lot of time hashing out the details, printing passes, and organizing arrangements for the announcements to get the word out about Computer Science week.
When I had time, I spent it on the app. I got to a point where I realized that the problem with our current scraping algorithm was the url we were using to scrape from, and not the code itself. This was a bit of a disappointment, because I was fairly certain that by using the shortcut through Google Chrome's developer tools, I would be able to scrape the athletic schedules easily. So, now I'm back to the source code of schedules and the proverbial drawing board.
Tuesday: 1:14-2:30
Wednesday: 1:14-2:30
This week was National Computer Science week, so I spent a lot of time getting our school involved in the festivities. Byte Club's advisor had the idea to have a computer science event on Friday of this week to introduce new people to computer science and raise the interest school-wide. She suggested that we give out passes to the computer science students she has now and let those students pick a friend of theirs that didn't know how to code to let them skip the class that the experienced student had their computer science class to come and learn with hourofcode.com. So, this week I spent a lot of time hashing out the details, printing passes, and organizing arrangements for the announcements to get the word out about Computer Science week.
When I had time, I spent it on the app. I got to a point where I realized that the problem with our current scraping algorithm was the url we were using to scrape from, and not the code itself. This was a bit of a disappointment, because I was fairly certain that by using the shortcut through Google Chrome's developer tools, I would be able to scrape the athletic schedules easily. So, now I'm back to the source code of schedules and the proverbial drawing board.
Monday, December 8, 2014
December 3-5
Wednesday: 12:25-2:30
Thursday: 1:16-2:30
Friday: 1:16-2:30
This week, I had some shortened class periods for my internship due to Keystone testing. This limited my ability to work, but I still tried to put in as much time as possible in the data scraping part of the code for the app. It's a bit of a struggle to find ways to scrape using javascript, though. Some of the other Byte Club members coded with me on Wednesday, and we found a way to use AJAX within javascript. The only problem is that it is difficult to determine whether or not the code is working since we have nowhere to print the result. I'm going to try to make a text file to print the source code gathered by the AJAX code, but I'm not sure how to coerce AppFurnace into letting me do that yet. One good thing about the week was that we had our monthly Byte Club meeting and some exciting things are happening. The groups are beginning to code, each has an idea and has started it, and we are planning on having a school-wide hour of code event next week.
I've had another slow week, but there is a lot of odd scheduling between now and Christmas, so I will just have to wait it out and try to get some work done outside of school to make up for the lost time. However, the club is progressing well. Some groups take their projects more seriously than others, but the ones who are genuine are doing very well. Also, the experience of the Hour of Code event will hopefully keep the club alive in the next few years. This week has given me a good experience of the less than organized work environment that can be common in computer science jobs. there are often loose time frames for the actual workday, but very strict timelines for the progression of a project. So the next few weeks will hopefully teach me to get used to odd schedules while still doing the work that needs to be done.
Thursday: 1:16-2:30
Friday: 1:16-2:30
This week, I had some shortened class periods for my internship due to Keystone testing. This limited my ability to work, but I still tried to put in as much time as possible in the data scraping part of the code for the app. It's a bit of a struggle to find ways to scrape using javascript, though. Some of the other Byte Club members coded with me on Wednesday, and we found a way to use AJAX within javascript. The only problem is that it is difficult to determine whether or not the code is working since we have nowhere to print the result. I'm going to try to make a text file to print the source code gathered by the AJAX code, but I'm not sure how to coerce AppFurnace into letting me do that yet. One good thing about the week was that we had our monthly Byte Club meeting and some exciting things are happening. The groups are beginning to code, each has an idea and has started it, and we are planning on having a school-wide hour of code event next week.
I've had another slow week, but there is a lot of odd scheduling between now and Christmas, so I will just have to wait it out and try to get some work done outside of school to make up for the lost time. However, the club is progressing well. Some groups take their projects more seriously than others, but the ones who are genuine are doing very well. Also, the experience of the Hour of Code event will hopefully keep the club alive in the next few years. This week has given me a good experience of the less than organized work environment that can be common in computer science jobs. there are often loose time frames for the actual workday, but very strict timelines for the progression of a project. So the next few weeks will hopefully teach me to get used to odd schedules while still doing the work that needs to be done.
Tuesday, December 2, 2014
November 24-25
Monday: 12:55-2:30
Tuesday: 12:55-2:30
During my two day week this week, I started to code small parts of the app. I started with the calendar feature that would be used for athletics events, lunch schedules, club and school events, etc. It sounded easy enough, but became slightly more complicated when incorporating leap years and the day of the week each month begins on and then using that day to determine which day the next and previous months begin on. I decided to display the calendar by coding a table in HTML to start, but the boxes of the resulting table will probably be too small to hold all of the information we want them to hold. So, I have started thinking about some alternative options. We could code the calendars as a list of the days of the month, which would be scrollable to give as much room as necessary for each month, or we could have each box in the calendar contain a button that would be disabled if there were no events for that day of the month. Each of these buttons would take the user to a page displaying the events on that specific day. The former seems better to me, but it might not be as aesthetically pleasing and I might end up having to scrap all of my code. So, to remedy my indecision, I'll ask the rest of the group for their opinions.During the weekend, we will be meeting with a former student of our club advisor who has experience making apps so that we can get his input on some of the aspects of the app that we don't understand. Hopefully, since we have a long break for Thanksgiving, we will also be able to get together to start working.
I'm excited that I got to start coding this week! Getting to actually code was very refreshing. It was a really small project that I took on, but I am definitely appreciating the programming aspect of this project rather than the organization side, which can get exhausting. Maybe once we get on a roll, the organization will come more easily.
Tuesday: 12:55-2:30
During my two day week this week, I started to code small parts of the app. I started with the calendar feature that would be used for athletics events, lunch schedules, club and school events, etc. It sounded easy enough, but became slightly more complicated when incorporating leap years and the day of the week each month begins on and then using that day to determine which day the next and previous months begin on. I decided to display the calendar by coding a table in HTML to start, but the boxes of the resulting table will probably be too small to hold all of the information we want them to hold. So, I have started thinking about some alternative options. We could code the calendars as a list of the days of the month, which would be scrollable to give as much room as necessary for each month, or we could have each box in the calendar contain a button that would be disabled if there were no events for that day of the month. Each of these buttons would take the user to a page displaying the events on that specific day. The former seems better to me, but it might not be as aesthetically pleasing and I might end up having to scrap all of my code. So, to remedy my indecision, I'll ask the rest of the group for their opinions.During the weekend, we will be meeting with a former student of our club advisor who has experience making apps so that we can get his input on some of the aspects of the app that we don't understand. Hopefully, since we have a long break for Thanksgiving, we will also be able to get together to start working.
I'm excited that I got to start coding this week! Getting to actually code was very refreshing. It was a really small project that I took on, but I am definitely appreciating the programming aspect of this project rather than the organization side, which can get exhausting. Maybe once we get on a roll, the organization will come more easily.
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