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.