We looked at Chapter 13 of the book. That dealt with shapes. A lot of the stuff we can do with shapes is fun and interesting, but not especially useful. However, we could do some interesting data visualisations.
I have an appointment I must keep today, so today's class in online.
In the last class we looked at how to skin a JavaFX aplpication using CSS. We saw that there are many named colors. However any color may be specified using the RGB and RGBA color systems. We saw examples of those color specification schemes in class but I didn't explain how the codes related to colors.
The RGB color scheme is explained in this video:
The RGBA color scheme specifies the color using RGB and the degree of transparency.
Students did an exam. That took a bit longer than I had planned for, but that's not a big deal. I offered to go through the solutions, but students didn't find that very attractive.
We spoke a bit about the assessments.
We took a look at arrays, Arrays are tricky but some things can only be achieved with them.
I created a YouTube channel with some videos I thought might be useful.
I screwed up the schedule by giving class yesterday when we were supposed to have presentations. Some groups exploited the confusion to claim they were not expecting to present today. That's fine. It was my mistake.
I will send an updated schedule around shortly.
Chris, Ben, Colin, and Calvin gave a presentation on Generation Tinder.
We looked at the Fair Use concept from the US and the equivalent fair dealing copyright exception in Ireland. We discussed the issues that arise when new works are created from existing ones. I asked students to act as jurors in hypothetical cases of music sampling where the defendants invoked the fair use defence and ask students to portion the ownership of the new work in cases where they found there was no fair use. The was considerable discussion about the extent of Kanye West's genius.
For this classes blog entry students will be expected to briefly outline and justify each decision.
The exam next Wednesday will have two questions.
Question 1 (60 marks) will be a programming problem. This can be answered in the kind of code we used for the phone problems. The marks will be for the logic. There is no need to be concerned with syntax. The problem will be of the kind we did in class.
Question 2 (40 marks) will be about loops.
The is a one-sheet exam. Students are allowed to bring a single A4 (front-and-back) sheet with them into the exam.
We began our look at Chapter 1 of the text book. There's a lot in that. We looked at anchor panes, grid panes, tile panes, and scroll panes. We got as fas as Listing 11-1
I asked student to get into groups and discuss the issues of downloading music for free. We discussed arguments for and against although most students said they do now download. Few students presented counter-argumets or justifications for downloading. That surprised me.
All of the discussion centered on the economic (instrumentalist) view. I highlighted the autor's rights point of view.