SOFT6008 Class 10

I was a bit distracted for the first hour of the lab, trying to organize to put all the notes online.

Students worked on the various examples and exercises.

Students who don't have the three games completed by end end of today are behind schedule.

Students how have them completed should begin re-coding them using the DOM. The dice game is the easiest one to start with. It might be an idea to review the rollover example we did. That has a lot of code in common.

I expected students to be able to make DOM versions of the games, but very few were making progress so I gave an example using a coin toss.

SOFT6007 Continuous Assessment

We will have an in-class exam on Monday 05 March.

It will contribute 20% towards your final grade.

SOFT7007 COM1 Class 10

We did another image map exercise in class. Students who missed the last class and didn't catch up online were a bit lost.

USA Cities grid

SOFT6007 DCOM1 Class 08 Lab

I arrived late, by which time everyone had left. Or maybe they never showed up in the first place.

I waited 10 min just in case anyone was later than I, and then went away too.

SOFT6007 ITS1/DCOM1 Class 09

We looked at definition lists, em tags, and discussed logical vs. physical markup. Then we saw how to code an image map. I gave an exercise in class for the last 15 mins

SOFT6007 COM1 Class 09

We looked at definition lists, logical markup vs. physical, and image maps. We did an image map exercise in the last 10 mins of class. Students should finish this in their own time.

SOFT6008 Exercise

This is how you make a button in a webpage to call some JavaScript

<button type="button" onclick="doSomething()">Go</button>

With the addition of this bit of code you now know enough to re-code the dice, cards, and slot machine games so they can be played by clicking a button instead of reloading the page. See if you can give it a go.

SOFT6008 Class 09

We looked at function and parseInt and a cautionary tale about JavaScript's loose types

I asked students to write a minimum function and an  average function that returns an integer.

[all done at 1751]

SOFT6007 Class 08 Lab A

I gave back the exam scripts and results form the exam earlier in the week. That was a reality check for students and for me.

Students worked away on the various exercises we had been doing. Most did tables of timetables. A few students struggled because they missed some classes.

Some were a bit frustrated that I didn't help them more. But the flip-side of having recordings the classes online is that students have to take responsibility themselves for catching up. I'm not going to fill in the blanks for them.

SOFT6007 COM1 Class 08 Lab B

I gave back the exam scripts and results form the exam earlier in the week. That was a reality check for students and for me.

Students worked away on the various exercises we had been doing. Most did the timetable.

I didn't give students my undivided attention. I was trying to organize putting the notes online.

SOFT6008 Functions

In the next class we will look at functions. I put an example with the following function in your dropbox.

function maximus (a,b,c)
{
if ( (a>=b) && (a>=c))
 {
 result = a;
 }
else if (b>=c)
 {
 result = b;
 }
else
 {
 result = c;
 }
return result

}

The function runs once with literal values, and once with user input values. But it doesn't behave like you'd expect. See if you can figure out what's going on.

SOFT6007 ITS1 Class 08

Students worked away coding pages. Some students are still trying to catch up

SOFT6008 Class 08

In today's class we didn't look at anything new. Students used the time to catch up on the exercises. I wanted to pause a little today to give people a chance get on top of things. Some students have yet to get with the program. I don't think the rest of us can wait for them much longer.

Students who had everything done checked that the random numbers weren't skewed. They modified their code to use floor instead of round.

In the next class we will look at functions

"Teaching Naked" video

During the week I recorded the audio for a short video I am making on "Teaching Naked". I had tried to record it at home at the weekend but the house was to noisy.

When I  started recording in my office I couldn't believe just how much noise there was. I couldn't, as you might think, hear the DJ Society doing it's thing 20m away, but I could hear all sorts of ambient noise. My desk is constantly vibrating, but I don't feel or hear it. My computer hums gently. As soon as I turned on the mic I could hear all these hidden sounds.

Audicity, like a lot of audio editing programs, has a fantastic noise reduction feature. You select a sample of "silence" and it analyses the noise. You can then subtract noise with those characteristics from the recording. It only works for structured noise, like a fan, or a hum. It won't work for people passing the the hall for example, or slamming doors. It if so impressive though I suspect I could record something on a plane and it would be fine.

A buddy of mine in Portugal is going to illustrate the video for me, if he has time. If not I'll have to do it myself.

SOFT6007 DCOM1/ITS1 Class 07

We had an in-class exam. But the results won't count towards the final grade. It was just for a reality check.

SOFT6008 Class 07

Students worked away on the various exercises.

Some students need to take a look at the New Orleans example again and really understand it before attempting the various exercises involving random images. Don't forget the discussion we had about randomness. Some students have unwittingly written code that has stacked the dice or deck. Those kinds of things could have gotten you shot in the wild west, if they'd had JavaScript :-)

There is a lot of interesting variety in the code being written to complete the euro change exercise. It's really worth thinking about the logic before writing the code. I've see a lot of code that is more complex than it needs to be. There is no need for nested loops. And if you think about it, what's the maximum number of 50c coins you will display. The solutions involving mod and integer division are clever, but brave.

Beware of intelligent quotes when copying and pasting. They have different ASCII values from regular double quotes and will break your code.

SOFT6007 DCOM1 no move on the cards

I looked into moving our Friday afternoon class to Tuesday evening, but there are no labs available at that time.

SOFT6007 COM1 Class 07

We had an in-class exam. But it was just for students to find out how they are doing. The results will not form part of the final grade.

SOFT6008 Plans

On Monday we will not cover any new material. Students have plenty of exercises to do and plenty code to to write.

SOFT6007

On Monday we will have an in-class exam on everything we're done so far. But there won't be any marks going for it.