Thursday 20 June

We started off the day with a research task that would help us with the next task in the computer games platforms & technologies unit. John gave each of us a specific component to research and place on a mind map, mine was HCI. I didn't find this task difficult but it wasn't easy either as I had to research not only, but everything associated with it. After we had done this, we had a look at another students version of the task we were about to do and I have to say it was very good. However, I was very surprised to hear that this was only graded as merit. I thought it was going to be distinction for sure but John said without referring to images, it can only get a merit.

I then got straight on with my work as I had a lot to re-do. So I did a mixture of all my outstanding units and managed to get some finished. The only thing I really want to get done is assignment three for 2D animation because it has been put off about two or three weeks now. 

Wednesday 19 June

You know the usual morning had begun when John showed you a video involving technology. The video explained Google's new idea to get internet to anyone via balloons. This was a very interesting concept, considering Google is just an internet browser and not an ISP. But none the less it’s still an amazing idea that I think Google is known for (bringing out the next answer to something). Today we had a TED video, this one was picked by Emanuel. The video was fairly interesting as the person on stage talked about robots (more specifically drones) that have the ability to make dangerous decisions without the need of humans controlling it. I think this is a scary thought as robots can be hacked, tampered with and most important malfunction. If any of those were to happen while the drone was flying over a city or other highly populated area with friendlies, It won’t be a very pleasant outcome.

The questions for the video were quite difficult and some weren't even remotely relevant to what he was talking about in the video, like "What was the colour of the guys eyes?” However, despite the difficult questions I still managed to get 7 out of 11.

Moving onto the work for the day, I continued creating graphics for my game. Deciding that my characters movement was going to be the most challenging. In the end I managed to find a video on how to make a character look like it is running. I very closely followed the video and the outcome of my running character was rather pleasing. 

Monday 17 June

Before the day began, a video was shown this morning talking about the new leap technology that will allow people to use touch screen without actually touching the screen. I thought this was interesting technology but I didn't really understand the purpose, still I thought there was a place for it in the technology world. Then John gave a talk to both levels about what we were doing today; the level 3's got a chance to explore a new piece of software called Game Maker Studio. This was the thing I had been waiting for as I really wanted to get stuck into creating my own game. Previously John had asked us to think about what type of game we would make by considering characters, level design, the menu and the power ups we would have in our game. I thought of a single platform game where the character would have to jump and duck to get around different obstacles in the game. As the levels progress the game get harder by the character coming up against different enemies and try to reach the end without getting killed. On the last level the character would have to parachute down to get to the finish line and complete the game.

We didn't actually begin the creation until later in the day as John wanted us to familiarise ourselves with the program and maybe pick up some tips and ideas that would help during the creation of our own game. I'm glad we were given time to look at the program and go through multiple tutorials as I can have some problems when it comes to programming. Once we were all somewhat confident with Game Maker, we told John our ideas (this is to make sure thy meet the criteria) and then got started on designing our assets (characters, levels etc). Not much was really accomplished today except learning a new program but I still enjoyed the experience and I hope my game turns out how I want it.

Thursday 13 June

Before we began today, John asked us what we thought was the most interesting technology in gaming industry at the moment. I said PS4, this was because it is the big talk at the moment and that it will be one of the best gaming consoles of all time alongside Xbox One. Although, the PS4 does have a slight advantage on the new Xbox. Dan had a good one which was virtual reality. He said this one because he felt nothing has really become successful through virtual reality technology and he would like to see something that really takes off using that type of method of gaming. Once everyone had voiced their opinion, we moved straight onto our work. Throughout the day, I was working with Dan on our animation as we needed to add suitable music to it and I had to finish the next task in the computer games unit.

As for the animation, I was handling it throughout most of the day as we both looked at music and agreed on what we wanted to add. I didn't learn anything new today as we just continued with our usual work, so today's blog post will be very short in comparison to other posts.

Wednesday 12 June

John started the day off by telling the class that he had the points back from one of the moderators. It said that the main issues with our work are the spelling mistakes and grammar. Which we had been told about in the past due to increasingly annoying repeats of work being handed in that wasn't spell checked, proof read or read out loud to check for grammar issues. I find with my work that I spell check it but don't really look out for grammar errors.

Today I was trying to catch up on work I had missed due to being absent for a few days. The work I was working on was the first two tasks of developing computer games. I managed to get the majority of task one done but will need to do some more tomorrow. The first task involved the impact of gaming on society in the form of a Power Point or report.

Wednesday 5 June

Today was another day where we could finish any of our outstanding work. I was trying to complete assignment 2 in software design unit and perhaps assignment 1 as well. I managed to finish off assignment 2 and will send that off to John so he can either mark it or send it to Catherine to so she can read through it. I have almost finished assignment on I just need to refine it a bit more and add some detail to it. Overall today I am happy with the work I got done as I am only here for half the day. Tomorrow I will move on to refining mine and Dan’s animation by adding some music to it.

Tuesday 4 June

We started off with our usual tech Tuesday video. This was about making everything a potential circuit and changing how things operate. This was an interesting video but the guy presenting it was quite strange. I've seen something like this before but not as inventive (the one I saw was drawing circuits). As usual, I got an 8/10 (which is good considering the questions given were quite difficult). I really enjoy these questionnaires that we do every Tuesday because it wakes me up in the morning and the video can be funny and very interesting. After this John introduced the unit to the class which involved games. I was excited for this unit as I enjoy gaming, so I should be confident with this unit. Once John had gone through the tasks and he gave us some sheets to do in groups of two(me and Ben were in the same group). By completing these sheets, we will have already done most of assignment one. This was how easy the unit seemed.

When we all came back from lunch, John said we could work on outstanding units, this was good news as I still have a few units left to complete. For the majority of the day I was working on the code for assignment 1 and assignment 2 of software design. Today was also the level 3 extended working time, where level 3s had to stay till 4.30. I don't mind as the time seems to fly by when you’re doing the work anyway. During this time, John introduced the final unit for the level 3s, this was very similar to the unit that was introduced earlier.

These are the sorts of units I prefer as they seem to overlap a lot, which makes it easier for me. Overall I found today enjoyable.

Monday 3 June

We started with a short reminder task that asked "What John expects when we hand in units of work?". We had to write this down solo on paper in a list. This was to get a point across that we aren't doing what John has asked when handing in units. However I feel that I always do what John had written on the board as his own list of what he requires when handing in units. John then shortly talked to us about priorities and that work should be the number one priority because we are in danger of not completing work in time to finish the course (we only have eight weeks left). We then got straight into the directed study day where we could do any work we had left outstanding. I was doing a mixture of work today and preparing a couple of units to be placed onto the hard drive for marking.

In the end I managed to get most of Software design assignment one and two done but will focus more on assignment 2 tomorrow and I was also tiding up all my outstanding units. Overall I found today quite relaxed with the work load we had and I am excited to begin the new unit tomorrow. The way John described it, sounded quite easy and straight forward but you never know. I also learned a bit more about coding and how to lay it out correctly, which is important in an efficient program.

Thursday 23 May

This morning we had begun with watching a video. This was explaining the failure that some people had performed when doing building work. I think John played this video to show us that the planning we had done during this animation unit wasn't up to par or the normal structure of doing things. I thought the planning we had done during this wasn't exactly at the level I would've done it but that's because I was in a group and I think we wanted to get straight into the making process. I wanted to make sure my groups animation was completed by the end of the day so I could focus on other work that needs to be done. Luckily we managed to get the basis of it completed and now we are just refining it. I am really happy with the animations completion and I hope the adjustments we make in the future will improve the overall project dramatically. Some of the problems with the animation include:

• Some frames too long/too short
• Masking
• Frame rate lag

Finishing the animation was a very long task as I had to do a lot of the effects in Photoshop and rub out a lot of mistakes that were in our animation. Overall I enjoyed today because we were able to work in a group and its good to see that our animation has finished.

Wednesday 22 May

The day started out as any normal morning at Develop, with a quiz. This quiz involved ten questions about programming. This quiz was to check that the class was listening when John was talking to us about the different areas of programming from the past couple of weeks. Once the quiz was over, I thought that I did well to remember the majority of the answers (that's because I was actually listening to John, unlike a lot of people in the class). None the less I got just over half the questions correct.

I then moved on to the work. I was still working on software design unit. I was working on assignment three today as that needs some attention and need to start on that. 

Tuesday 21 May

Instead of Ted Tuesday, it was Tech Tuesday. This week’s video was about the house of the future, which was made by Microsoft. This was quite an interesting video and made me think about the possibilities of what might be possible in as little as two years. My score for this week was 7/10. We then moved straight back onto our work in the software design unit. This for me was going back to assignment two and assignment one to finish them off. I got started on it and overall it took me the majority of the day to write because I had to write down some notes beforehand and then read through it in my head till the wording was correct, I got all the necessary information to fully complete the work.

I still need to work on these pieces of work as I think I need to add a lot more to meet the criteria. Finally today, John talked to the level 3s about what is happening next year and a short talk about the final task in assignment five for website production. 

Monday 20 May

We started off the day with a quiz on the BBC news website. The questions within the quiz were related to programming (as expected). I achieved a score of 5/7, which wasn't bad considering I am not the best in this particular area. I then moved straight onto software design work, which was assignment two and three. This is where I became incredible puzzled with this work as I wasn't sure where to begin. After a couple of hours of trying to get my head around this work, I managed to get a fair bit of work completed in the end. I realise now what I should of done is that I should have broken the tasks down and went through them one at a time. This would've been easier to concentrate on and I probably would've got more work done.

I managed to understand the work I had trouble with (for the majority of today) and I should be completing it easily by the end of the week. Overall I found today a little frustrating because of the work.

Thursday 16 May

We started the day off by watching an A-level produced animation that involved a girl working through a paper forest. At first I didn't really get the animations message but by the end I think I understood it. The reason John showed us this was to make us think about how long it takes to create a good animation. After this was made clear, we got straight on with our animation work. This was something that needed to be finished but it just took too long to figure things out and actually physically do them. Working on my animation really made the day slow and I think that I would've got more work done if I did other work that needs finishing. I originally thought the editing for the animation was going to be interesting but it’s actually quite dull.

Throughout the day, I was working with Dan on the video editing part. It was also because I wanted to switch jobs with him every so often. This was to make the editing process less dull. The funniest part to the day was the "demo" just before we finished. Where Catherine had to make sure we knew how to put a condom on a purple penis. This was very important and I found it difficult to take it seriously when everyone else was making jokes and laughing about it (including myself). But none the less I thank Catherine for taking the time to make sure we were all educated on the condom process. So overall I found the animation editing quite slow but the talk was the funniest end to a day (that wasn't really meant to be funny but turned out to be hilarious) so far.

Wednesday 15 May

Today I was working on assignment three which everyone had started yesterday but I was not here to start the work as I was ill. Assignment three involved creating a program for a painting company named Painted. This program is being made to estimate the cost of painting a single room. Furthermore, this program must take into consideration the size of all the walls and windows in the room, how many walls and windows there are in the room, what quality of paint is being used, whether undercoat is required and many other factors. To start off with I wrote a functional specification that would explain what the program must do. I then moved straight onto the design phase, which required me to make flow diagrams of each phase the program must calculate (area of all the walls, what type of paint and customer ID etc). Creating the diagrams was easier than I originally thought.

Today I learned how to effectively write a detailed functional specification and how easy it is to create flow diagrams for a specific piece of information. Overall I found that today went rather quick, that’s probably because it is only a half day.

Monday 13 May

We started the day with two unusual tasks this morning, proof reading work and writing 5000 lines. The 5000 lines task was a trick question that had a lot of us fooled, but I thought as soon as I saw that, that I could write this in small basic where I could write a couple of line of code and then it would write 5000 lines. This was a clever way to teach us about coding a large amount of lines. This was to further imprint in our brains the importance of proof reading. So for nearly three hours (in groups of two), we all proof read six pieces of work and then compared the work in our groups (I worked with Ben). This really made me appreciate the amount of time John spends marking our work.

In future, I will proof read my work by: spell checking it, reading it out loud (in a quiet environment) and asking other people to read through it too as I think other people may pick up on mistakes that, I may have missed. This task helped me understand even further, what steps I need to take when proof reading my own work. After lunch, John wanted us to work on programming assignment one or assignment two. I decided to work on assignment one because there was a small amount left to finish and the first draft has to be handed in soon.  Even though there wasn't much left to do on this assignment, it still took more longer than I expected.

Overall I found today one big learning experience with the proof reading and coding tasks this morning. I also found working with Ben to be rather fun, because we have always been able to work together and get things done with any hassle.

Thursday 9 May

Today when I came in me and Dan decided to work on our editing of our animation. Dan soon realised that he wanted to get on with other work so he could and his final piece in tomorrow.
I cracked on with the editing of our animation, when I imported the animation into Sony Vegas i had a problem on my hands where all the images had to be resized to shorten the video. It took me all day to individually go through each and every one of those images (over 2000 altogether) and resize them. when i got half way through i thought should i leave this for another day and get on with some other work but then i thought nope i have started this so i am going to finish it, which i eventually did.
Then i started on editing the images to take out things we didnt want in, i didnt get very far on the as the day had flown by and it was home time.

Wednesday 8 May

Today was Wednesday which meant Chris from Netmatters paid us a visit to our centre to talk about website production. This was the first thing that happened in the morning so we had to open up our finished or not finished websites  for Chris to look at, we had to get our questions ready and familiarise ourselves with SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle). This was in case Chris talked about SDLC and if we had forgotten, then we wouldn't know what he was talking about. So when Chris came into the room, he opened up his presentation and began to talk us through the development process of creating a website and showing us some of the websites his company has created. I found looking at some of the great work Netmatters has done very interesting and I thought the artwork for the sites were very appealing.

After the presentation was finished he took some questions and came round to look at the websites we had created during the website production unit. When Chris looked through my website, he said it was good but very blue, which it is as that was what I was going for. I think it was a great idea for Chris to look at everyone’s websites because someone who does it professionally for career knows what’s good and what’s bad. Overall I enjoyed the presentation he gave us.

Before most of us went home Catherine gave a short presentation on how to proof read effectively. This was because John found that the majority of the classes work had poor grammar and some spelling mistakes.