Tuesday 7 May

Today, the day begun as normal after a four day weekend due to the bank holiday. John threw another coding exercise upon us. This exercise was to create a program, which would convert Celsius to Fahrenheit when a temperature is entered. A few people found this task easy and unfortunately I wasn't one of them this time, this time when the task was explained by John and jack, the answer became clear after I was told how to do it. I then wrote down the formula and the layout of which the program would work and I was then confident I would be able to write the program in small basic but I did not have time to do this as John wanted to move on and talk about the next assignment. We then moved onto start assignment 2 of programming which seems fairly straight forward. And shouldn't take too long to complete

Questions for tomorrow

What is your favourite program to create a website in?
How many different programs have you used to create a website?
What are the main qualifications you need to get this kind of job?
What requirement make an ideal website?

*The rest of the blog will be completed later*

Thursday 2nd May

Before we got cracking on any work, John wanted emails from us all stating what work we had outstanding and in prioritised order. This is so he had an idea of what work we had left to finish off. When I finished writing the list of tasks I had left to complete, I thought it was a lot of work. But when I started moving down the list, I realised that it actually wasn't that much as the title suggests, the tasks for the day included a variety of units. I started out with finishing my animation with Dan as we knew that it would only take us half an hour to an hour tops to complete the whole animation. As we were filming the animation, Zu3D became incredibly laggy and very slow at responding, which made taking frames more frustrating because when you would press the button, it looked like nothing had happened. So if you clicked it again, more frames would be taken, which was not the idea we wanted.

Despite that we still managed to finish the animation, now comes the editing process. Dan wanted to get on with other work so I let him do that. I started on the editing and taking some images out to make it a lot smoother. After 10-15 minutes of doing that I realised I needed to recover my website that I had lost when my pen drive killed itself. After somehow recovering it (had no idea how I did it as recovering programs wouldn't recover the file format) I started editing my website again and asked John to help me out as I wanted to change the colour of the buttons, we managed to figure it out and I achieved what I wanted to achieve.

Overall I enjoyed today because it was more relaxed and we were able to do a variety of work and get one with them. It was also enjoyable as John seemed very relaxed and let us listen to some music throughout the day. I also learned more about teamwork and how to create a successful 3D animation. 

Wednesday 1st May

Today was another day at the centre but the only difference is that we are into a new month.

Today we started off with another activity to do with programming. This one encouraged us to think for ourselves about how to make a program for the system picking a random number between one and one-hundred. The user would then have to guess that number. I cracked on with this task and completed it fairly quick, I programmed the whole thing in small basic without any help from anyone else, I got a great sense of achievement. After a while, I noticed Dan was struggling, he had only written a couple of line so I shew him mine and explained what I did, I then let him copy my coding and he could stare at it for a while to understand it. I think in the end he realised what he had to do.

Today was a half day for me so I left the centre at 12 o’clock which was lunch time.

Today, overall I enjoyed the day as the tasks John gave us were very enjoyable and tested my knowledge and skills.

Tuesday 30th April

Today we started out with another programming starter today but this was more focused on data types and variables. Data types I wasn't so bad with because I spent quite a bit of time learning about the different data types last week. I managed to complete the task that john had given us with ease but Dan seemed to struggle a little so I helped him. This starting exercise helped me understand more about data types and what ones are for specific things. We then moved straight onto this weeks TED video; the video featured Marco the magician showing us the amazing combination of magic and technology. The TED questions were created by Phoebe but the video we all had already seen when John did a TED Tuesday A few months ago. I didn't mind seeing it again because it was one of my favourite TED videos as if amazed me what you can do when you combine technology and magic together.

Once TED was complete, we continued with assignment 1 of programming. This is the assignment that has to be completed by Friday and because I am trying to completely understand it whilst I write It down on paper, doing so  is causing me to working slower than others but I think Dan is doing the same so at least I’m not the only one. I think to give us all a bit of a rest from programming, John allowed us to work on other units because a lot of work needs to be handed in on Monday. Me and Dan decided it would be a good idea to work on our animation as it is very close to being finished and we were both confident we could finish it today.

After today, we have nearly a minute's worth of animation. I think we should be able to get the animation finished by Thursday. Today I learnt about CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) tools, IDE's, data types and variables. I enjoyed the starter task because I think it’s a great way for all of us to get used to programming and things associated with programming.

Monday 29th April

Today we begun the day by doing a coding starter, what we had to do was to try and fix a program to make it work. The program purpose was finding the perimeter and area of a rectangle, which didn't work correctly. I found this a good task and managed to complete it in quick succession and got it to work okay. After a while I noticed Dan looked stuck so I asked him if he needed any help at all so me and Shane resolved the issue he had and got his to work.

After this John gave a short talk about what help is available with this unit because a lot of us still seem to be confused and I think this gave some closure to some people in the class.

Then we got straight on with assignment 1 of the programming unit. I was still researching about the different types of programming, which are Procedural, object oriented and event driven. These started out as being quite confusing but as I researched and asked Dan a few question, the more I understood. By the end of the day, I completely understood what procedural and object oriented programming were and some of their advantages/disadvantages. I am glad I took the time to write down and learn these so I fully understood. I am quite confident when it comes to the coding but will still need some help in the future maybe, like most people in the class.

Overall I found today a bit more of a wakeup call than usual for the whole class, especially my level because the level threes group are falling behind and by John saying that we were behind and that deadlines should be stricter, I wanted to try and work harder and faster if it was possible for me to do so. This was a great boost of motivation and after starting the programming unit.

Thursday 25th April

Today we were carrying on with our animation from Tuesday  The start of the groups animation creation was under way today as me and Dan had finished creating our story board and we were ready to start making our assets. However, before we could do that we had to set up the stage area and zu3D on a laptop to begin creating the animation. After setting our stage up we started making assets out of plasticine and testing out some techniques, but just five minutes into testing and we had already changed a couple of aspects of the animation. The camera angle was changed to more of a slanted view to make it less complicated for us, how the morphing happens from one object to another and lighting has also been changed.

By lunch we had about four to five seconds of testing footage. We played the footage back and the technique worked perfectly, the motion was great and the lighting made the picture crystal clear. I am glad John gave us more time to alter our treatment or storyboard if needed because we actually changed it physically and how some of the animation works. The time today proved well worthy as we were able to test out techniques and see if what we wrote down on paper would actually be doable not only by us but by other people as well.

After a lunch me and Dan decided to leave the creation and got on with the written side of the unit, we did this because we said we would come in tomorrow and carry on with creating our animation.

I think I and Dan worked well in a team by listening to each other’s ideas and doing different parts of a scene. I learned today that detail in planning is very important to an animation project to succeed in being fully complete and doing a test session before the real creation can really benefit the project too. I can't wait to see the animation come together and play the finished and final version of our animation

Wednesday 24th April

Today was once again Programming but instead of the usual this time John was focused on teaching us about the program life cycle and a simpler approach to programming code. To start off with we loaded up a program called scratch, this was a simple introduction to creating a game. John gave us a task to create a PAC man game using the instructions in the word document he provided. I had seen a bit of this before during an open day that I stayed and helped with when I was doing the Hardware with Jack, so I had an idea of what to expect. However before the task begun, John mentioned that this had been given to year 6s and they managed to finish it in an hour so he gave us about 30 minutes to complete the task. I found it rather easy and quite enjoyable at certain parts, I did not need any help from anyone but I had to help Dan when he got a little stuck. I understand why John gave us this task; to ease some of us into programming who don't fully understand how programming works.

After break John gave us another task to do as we had all completed the first task. this task was to research about and into the program life cycle. we collect some information and a diagram and shared what we knew about it from what we had collected.

Today was a good day and enjoyed what we did. I learnt about programs life cycle and how a program starts off and how it ends up.