Tuesday 14 December, 2010

Yay!
It's my 64th post (although I'm not sure why this is important...)!

Anyways, today everyone received their ICS Programming Test #2 back and I have to say that I am shocked! I'm happy with my mark, but I'm confused about how I received them.

I knew that I would lose marks on Question 6 because I used the name "length" for one of my variable identifiers, yet I only lost half a mark for using var in my parameters. Honestly, I thought that I would lose more marks on Question 6 and ace everything else, but it turns out that I messed Question 1 up really badly! I only received 0.5 marks for my efforts even though I mentioned seperating words by underscores and all the details, but now that I think about it, I missed the whole point of the Question.

Question #1 asked for the rules, not good programming etiquette. I provided the latter, resulting in the mediocre mark. The model answer consisted of mentioning that the identifier can be of any length, must start with a letter, and can be composed of any characters. That would have received more marks and I know that I goofed that part up on way to a score of 21!

A 21/24 wasn't what I expected (I thought that I would score a 20!), but I can't really argue with this mark probably because I know that I received more than what I think I deserved... Percentage-wise, an 87.5 is average and brings my whole ICS Mark down to an 89.75, a few marks away from a 90. Now, I'll work harder to raise my average up...

A good start would be polishing my Snake Game, which I have not worked on since yesterday. With the introduction to more advanced programming techniques, I can show everyone what I am capable of, mainly the game/s that I created, although they're not that great compared to David, Felix, and Zelin's games.

Today, we had to write a program which "bounced" a character around the screen. I had planned my time to finish this assignment in 30 minutes, and I did just that, although this post is taking another 10 minutes and hindering my time saved for polishing my essay. I used multiple boolean variables and many if and loop bodies so that in the end, I was very confused by the ...

                                         end loop

                                end if

                    end loop

etc...

At first, when I ran the program, the characters kept on disappearing as the character was bouncing back towards the start. Then, my desk-checking (20 seconds of it!) revealed that after I put the character, the cursor would have been moved to the next line, and thus I added a ".." to four sections of my code in which each section controls either the up or down movement from either the first or last columns. Now, the program works perfectly and I'm going to print it out and finish editing my essay before 12 am and turn-it-in to TURNITIN.COM and go to bed early for swimming tomorrow and prepare my clarinet solo for the Christmas Assembly and...(GASP, GASP, PANT, PANT...)

That's all for today!