Guest Teacher Part 2. [November 30,2010]

November 30,2010. Tomorrow's December (Christmas time!)! I'm so excited! And high! And happy! I just read the first chapter of Last Sacrifice by Richelle Mead. I've waited so long for that. Okay, well anyways, today, Mr. Arkin wasn't here again, so we continued working on our substrings assignments. I finished up to Assignment 6, which is awesome. Tomorrow, he is going to be away again, so I will continue working on my assignments. 8D
For homework, it's the daily blog posting and progress on the assignments. Same old, same old. Seven more days until the release of Last Sacrifice! I gonna count down ;D

-Cindy

Guest Teacher! [November 29,2010]

November 29,2010. Well then. I had a longer post, but my internet crashed and it's really late, so I'm not gonna retype it. In a nutshell, we had a supply teacher and we worked on substrings. I finished the first three assignments (prettied up and all!) and am currently moving onto the fourth.
For homework, we were to finish our daily blog and continue to work on our substrings assignments. Tomorrow's a late start day! YAY 8D

-Cindy

Complete! [November 26,2010]

November 26,2010. Today, I've finished all my assignments! Yuup! I feel a huge weight off my shoulders. :D
At the beginning, we had a turing show off thing, where Prashanth showed us his awesome piano-like program. Hey, I could argue that I have enough pianos in my life without an electronic version. Anyways, we continued working on our assignments, which I've completed!
Our homework is to post in our daily blog and to prepare for our test! Tonight, it's the girls about girls sleepover at vic park, I'm excited. :D
Good bye computer! (for a good 24 hours)

-Cindy

Working Working Working! [November 25,2010]

November 25,2010. Nothing important happen in class today. Just another work period. Homework is daily blog and continue working on all assignments. There'll be another test next week in turing. :D

-Cindy

Mid terms! [November 24,2010]

November 24,2010. Today, ICS was right after lunch! I was particularily excited about today, as we got as close to a report card as it gets for us peeps in high school. Yuup, that's right, mid-terms (though technically, it's the middle of the semester and not mid-term). First, Mr. Arkin taught us about using arrays, with new keywords array and of. This was cool! It was equivalent to list type things on microsoft word or HTML. Basically, it creates many different spaces in memory under the same gerneral name, but with subscripts to differienciate. So in class, we modified our Repetition 12 to include arrays.
Mr. Arkin also told us that the next two days would be work periods, to get caught up on all the work so far. For homework, we were to finish daily blog and repetition 12 modified.

-Cindy

It's working again! [November 23,2010]

November 23,2010. Today, in ICS, we continued working on our repetition assignments. Mr. Arkin also 'took-up' the printer comparison assignment, complete with our marks posted in front of Lab 218's door. So yuup, nothing new, same old same old.

-Cindy

Same old, same old. [November 22,2010]

November 22,2010. YES! I feel so relieved and free! I've just finished my english quiz and science unit test and I felt I did okay. But that's to worry about another time. Right now, I will blab about today's ICS class. We handed in our assignment 8 modified and continued working on our repetition assignments. Today's homework was to finish the assignments up to 11, which I've done. Just the blog posting to go! :D

-Cindy

Loaded with Ammo? No! Homework! [November 18,2010]

November 18,2010. Finally! It's my first ever PD day (yes, it used to be PA) in high school! No one will understand how much I've been waiting for tomorrow. It was supposed to be awesome, a late night tonight, wake up at 12:00pm, and then go shopping. Well, that was what I'd thought before ICS class today. In class, Mr. Arkin assigned us a webpage project, which brings us back to using HTML and CSS to create the perfect webpage to compare and recommend printers to a high school student (like me!). We also had to use a table, which could be found at touque.ca. So, there goes my weekend.
For the rest of class, we worked on our Repetition assignments. I modified assignment 8 so that it accepted integers and reported if it was an even number or not. For homework, we had to finish the printer comparison assignment and catch-up on repetition assignments.

-Cindy

Two-in-One Deal? No way! [November 17,2010]

November 17,2010. Just two more days until Harry Potter: Deathly Hallows comes out! Of course, it'll only be part one, but we're still making progress here. So today in class, Mr. Arkin told us to pair off and analyze & desk check our partner's Repetition assignment 6. We wrote down all the errors and the stuff our partner's did well so that when we did go to the computers, fixing the programs would be easy. Afterwards, we continued working on our Repetition assignments. I finally got assignment 9 to work! Also, tonight, I learned how to play background music in my program (and such is the power of google)!
For homework today, we were to finish Repetition assignments 7 & 8 with a modification to 7 so that it allows the user to specify the character repeated and the number of rows. Cool right? Oh and also, daily blog posting. ;D

-Cindy

Working, Working, Work period! [November 16,2010]

November 16,2010. Today, we had our first surprise homework check. Mr. Arkin had us take out and submit what we felt was our very best repetition assignment. As I thought my Repetition 2 modified was pretty okay, I submitted that one. Then, while he gave advice to each student individually on their assignments, we worked on our repetition assignments. I got as far as repetition 8, which means I've completed today's homework. And now, part two of my homework, the daily blog posting, is done too! :D

-Cindy

Adding the music! [November 15,2010]

November 15, 2010. Today, Mr. Arkin showed us many different things, among them, how to alternate row colors, to add pretty headers and to play music! We learned new keywords, such as the play and the getch keyword. The getch keyword is like get, but it only takes one character, which is stores under the variable name with a data type of string (1).
Afterwards, Mr. Arkin let us work on our repetition assignments for the rest of the period, after telling us that he expects all our programs from now on to be pretty and "sophisticated." For homework, we were to complete repetition assignments 3-5 and our daily blog.

-Cindy

What? Repeat! [November 12,2010]

November 12,2010. Today, we learned a new program control, repeat! Which means we have just started another chapter in our long novel of programming. Like I said with selection, this only gets more and more interesting. Mr. Arkin showed us three keywords and one key phrase, loop, exit, when, end loop. He taught us that the 'test' (exit when), must always be after the change in value, for the program to function correctly. Then, he showed us a few different fragments, each with the test placed differently. It goes to show, it actually does matter! :D
For homework, we were to work on repetition assignments 1 & 2, with a modification to allow the user to specify starting and ending values and the daily blog of course.

-Cindy

Review time! [November 11,2010]

November 11,2010. Today is Remembrance day. Lest we forget. TTuTT
Okay, now that that's done and I've paid my respects, onto today's ICS class! First, we went over the model-answer to the test questions with a partner and wrote the best answer down for our notes. Afterwards, we went over them as a class, with Mr. Arkin showing us his model answers. Then, the moment we've been waiting for, he gave us back our tests (so fast!)! I was disappointed with my results, but this meant that I will have to work harder, which is a good thing, because Mr. Arkin's decided to start testing us more! D:
For homework today, we were to finish the arithmetic mean program that uses the counters and accumulators we learned in class the day before yesterday. I'm done that, so I just have to post my daily blog, which I did too, as of now.

-Cindy

Test-ing! Test-ing! Programming one-two-three! [November 10,2010]

November 10,2010. Today was our first ever programming unit test! It was very professional, with the instructions written out for us on the board. We spread around the room to prevent things like cheating and then we started! The test was actually pretty easy in itself. It was the cursive writing part that bugged me. A lot. I rewrote my answers up to three times because I was afraid Mr. Arkin couldn't read it (and I'm totally not sure if he can). Afterwards, we took a head start on silent reading, leaving us half an hour of silently reading our awesome material.
  For homework, we were to write our daily blog, and complete the arithmetic-mean program fragment for tomorrow. And I'm done! Yay! :D I will now go study science. >.>

-Cindy

Questions! [November 9,2010]

November 9,2010. Today's the last day until our first ever programming test! I'm so nervous! :D
Okay, that's not entirely true. After what we did in class, I'm pretty confident that I won't do horribly bad on the test. During class today, Mr. Arkin addressed any concerns or questions we had about the things we learned about Turing so far. We discussed things like the literal and declared constant values, the difference between keywords and identifiers, and syntactical and logical errors, and procedures and functions. Afterwards, when all of our curiosity had been sated, Mr. Arkin moved on to two more definitions for our programming glossary, counter and accumulator. A counter is a variable of the integer type that counts/keeps track of the number of times something occurs. Accumulators accumulate the measurements. With this, we created a small, short and simple program that had the user input a mark and find the mean of the mark, except this was done multiple times and each time, the accumulator and counter would be different. Anyways, tomorrow is the big test! So I'm studying frantically right now. Wish me luck!

-Cindy

Present-ations! [November 8,2010]

November 8,2010. I am fully energized and ready to go! After I got my hour back from Daylight Savings Time, I felt I could do anything! Anyways, in computers, my team and I presented the code analysis that we worked so painstakingly on. It went pretty smoothly and we watched the rest of the groups present theirs, all the while taking notes on things -little details- we missed. After wards, Mr. Arkin had everyone go outside and take notes on Class B's posters, which were posted on the wall. Wow! They really wrote a lot! After that, we analyzed each other's selection 7. My partner found errors on mine but that was resolved as Mr. Arkin allowed us time to fix our programs and print out the edited versions.
For homework, we were to post our daily blog and study for our first ever programming test. I hope I do well! :D

-Cindy

Binders, check! [November 5, 2010]

November 5,2010. Today, we started our assignment, which was to analyze the code given to us by Mr. Arkin and create a poster like information sheet on a large piece of paper. We worked in the same group as yesterday. The three of us divided the work up so that we didn't have to repeat or waste our efforts. This proved extremely effective, but we wanted the poster to look good, so I took it home for the weekend. But then, I just had to leave it in my last period class. D:
I will now email Mr. Arkin and ask if I could buy some chart paper and do it on that. Bad for the environment, but good for our marks, no?

Noire means Black! [November 4,2010]

November 4,2010. Today, it's the school dance! But I have a science thing due tomorrow! Oh well.
So anyways, in class today, Mr. Arkin told us to get into groups of three and desk check the model answer of Selection 6. My groupmates, Lisa and Prashanth, and I worked really well together and desk-checked the program. We did it three times, once for each of the if statements in order to execute all parts of the code and realized that constants got a spot in the RAM too. Anyways, our class was a bit slow on the desk-checking today, so we never got to move onto the real assignment. Because of this, Mr. Arkin will now be doing a binder check tomorrow. Now I have to print out all the stuff I'm missing from my binder.
For homework, we were to do the blog posting, and to desk check three selection assignments. Easy right?

-Cindy

Take your kids to work! [November 3,2010]

November 3,2010. Take your kids to work day! YAY ! It was actually sort of boring. We listened to different agencies of the government talk about their responsibilities and what not. They also showed us a real detector dog! Which was probably the high-light of my day.
So I had a longer post, but my internet shut down on me and I lost it. So this'll be it for now. Sorry.

-Cindy

Case closed! [November 2, 2010]

November 2, 2010. Tomorrow is Take you kids to work day! So no classes at all tomorrow! YAY 8D
But the bad thing is that I have to wake up earlier than I would on a regular day. But at least it's different. Okay, so enough of me rambling. Today in class, Mr. Arkin explained the case statement to us in detail. He taught us the difference between using the case statement and the if statement and the pros & cons of each. In the end, we learned that the case statement is very useful for programs with lots of options. Yuup. Today was an important day for taking another step in the basics of Turing!

-Cindy

It's a new month after all-- ♪ [November 1,2010]

November 1,2010. It's the start of a new month! And, in case you didn't know, you need to sing the title to this song. Cool right? Anyways, moving right along, today, I read about a new type of selection, to be used when there are too many options to use if. Yep, that's right; the case & label. It's actually pretty cool, but the language used on the page was a bit complex, so I'm looking forward to tomorrow's class where Mr. Arkin will (hopefully) explain it to us in plain English.
Today, in class, Mr. Arkin handed back our quizzes to us. I did fairly well on it, but I know I could do better, that there'll always be room for improvements. For the rest of the period, we worked in groups (or rather partners) and tried to figure out a 'hybrid' solution to all of the selection assignments. I actually learned a lot from it. Near the end of class, we conveyed as a class and discussed the most awesome-est solution to the problems. Again, I ate up new knowledge hungrily. Om  nom  nom. 8D
For homework, we were to post our daily blogs and preview the selection two. I've done both already, so check and check. I will now go to sleep (sorta).

-Cindy