March 30th Status Report

This week was a shortened because the entire tenth grade had to write a literacy test on Thursday. We mostly spent our time working on a large Visual Basic program, although we had some lessons on arithmetic operators, comparison operators and logical operators. We also used dialog boxes in the large program that we were working on this week.

The program that we worked on this week calculated the weekly payroll of a worker, for the program to work correctly the information would be retrieved from the hours worked and the amount of cups sold. Once we finished the basic outline of the payroll program, we had to add a menu and two dialog boxes, so the user could enter their own hourly rate and tax rate. I finished the program and they work successfully.

I had a couple problems this week; one was with the dialog boxes and the other was calculating the commission according to the hours worked and cups sold. I had to figure out to put brackets on the calculations for the commission for the program to work. I also had some problems with the dialog boxes. In the beginning I thought we only needed one dialog box, later I figured out that we needed two, so for the first dialog box I had mixed up the code and the program was not working properly. Next week we are starting our first project in partners and I am eager to get started.

March 23rd Status Report

We started of the week with a lesson on data types in Visual Basic and we were introduced to scroll bars and picture boxes. We had to work in pairs to do an assignment where we had to define what the string data types purpose was, and in what situations they should be used. We made a String tutorial for the data types that we did in the earlier assignment. I had some difficulties with the development of the program, but once I cleared some errors the program ran smoothly.

I completed everything that was required this week; this included the two programs and the essay on web awareness that I will be finishing this weekend. I continue to learn more about Visual Basic programming. For the first time I used a scroll bar, track bar, picture box and list box.

Most of my problems this week stemmed from the String tutorial that I developed. I had trouble writing the code with a proper case statement for some of the data types. It took me a while to figure out how to write in the data types in the list box, since it was a new control to me.
I'm glad with the work done this week, because I learned many new controls and I was challenged this week with the different programs.

March 9th Status Report

This week was mainly a work week, we didn't have very many lessons learning about new information. We did learn about debugging our programs and what errors we should look for. I learned that there are 3 groups that programming errors can be classified into; compiler errors, runtime errors and logic errors.

We had a test on flowcharts and programming, this was the first programming test we had so it was a new experience. I believe I did pretty well on the test. We continued to work on our visual basics programs. We had an assignment that was due Friday, it was a case program, where we had to make a election ballot to calculate who won, came second or came third.

For the future I would like to get better at working with case programming. I think with some time getting more familiar with this system of programming I will learn more and improve positively as a programmer.

March 2nd Status Report

This week we primarily focused on our visual basics programming. We learned about software documentation and when and how we should use it. We learned about if and else statements, and case statements. We had many programs to do that were very interesting and I'm glad that I now have the knowledge to make my own programs.

The greatest challenge I faced was finding out to do some of the visual basics programs. In particular the hardest program I faced was the program that asked the user what the plural of sheep was. I did not know how to finish the code, but with some trial and error I succeeded with the program.

For the future I hope to continue enhancing my knowledge with programming. I would like to start doing more complex programs with more complicated codes.

Febuary 23 Status Report

We started of the week with a test on everything we had done so far.  We were assigned
to develop a flowchart for a program that inputed three numbers and outputted them in
ascending order.  We learned about the differences of structured and object oriented
programming, then we worked on some challenging brain teasers.  On Wednesday we
developed our first VB program, which was a calculator that calculated tax and the total cost
of something.  Towards end the week of we walked through program codes, that we should
become familiar with and use them when working with the visual basics program.

The biggest challenge I faced was working with my Visual Basics program.  I hadn't
ever done any programming before so I was slightly confused when we first started working
with the program.  To help me complete the program I followed the steps very carefully.  I
had my peers around me to help me if I had any problems, but I mostly knew how to do the
program myself, once I got the hang of it. 

Febuary 16th Status Report

During this week we learned many new things. We were introduced to simple computer terms, as well as simple and extended models of a computer as well as their memories. We learned about memory size prefixes, i.e. gigabytes, bytes and we had an activity with these terms. We learned about pseudo codes and different types of software. We also did all the flowchart questions together as a class. Lastly we learned about cryptography, and creating simple codes using substitution and then solving these codes. The cryptography lesson was my favorite because I had always been interested in this because of the instances where I saw it in famous movies.

The only work I have left to do this week is to finish the cryptography assignment. The only challenges I faced this week were with the flowcharts. While doing the flowchart problems together as a class I started to figure out where I was making my mistakes. I still have some aspects to improve with my understanding of flowcharts, so I will be studying hard this weekend to prepare for the test that is coming up on Monday.

Alright, I'm sending an email to my blog, lets see if this works!

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