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.