An earthquake hits Christchurch

Last Tuesday, an earthquake struck Christchurch. I was in the Town Hall Auditorium with fellow teachers waiting for our Paid Union Meeting to start when the lights went out and the polygonal sound baffles hanging from the ceiling started to sway. After unsuccessfully trying to get our heads under the seats (when you are not sitting on them, they fold up) the four of us left the building and joined hundreds of other people in the middle of Kilmore Street. I remember waiting for someone to come and tell us what to do next - it took me a while to realise that the disaster had not just hit us, and that we needed to look after ourselves.

Some of us went to the corner of Kilmore and Colombo to check out the collapsed buildings for trapped people. Some of us found colleagues and wondered about doing a roll check. Some of us headed home in determined fashion. Some of us stood and wondered what we should do, and eventually moved around the corner to Colombo Street directed by a man with an armband on. We wept, hugged, shared handkerchiefs and continually tried to text or call people we love.

I am going to write my earthquake story in installments between doing useful things.

Continuing with Colour

I have done all the colour lessons from the Arty Factory website - there are still art lessons here to do but that is not my current direction. I am intrigued by the MacTaggart work called Rainbox that I am showing in this post.

Interestingly, in trying to find more information about this piece of art, I discovered that the same content that Arty factory offers is also provided by

1. Fun-roc who claim to own it all
2. Magda Vacariu who acknowledges the Arty Factory website but has copied all the content into her own blog for art students - why not just link to it?

My next step is to explore the Color Worqz website.

Year 10 Thursday 17th June

Morena, Year 10!

Today I am not sick but am at a course.

Your work today is:

1. Finish your hardware worksheet from Thursday ( in iNet --> DigiTech --> All Teachers --> Year 10 if you were away), make it fit onto one page by deleting the instructions and reformatting, and print for your folder.

2. Find out about what is inside the computer's main box (called a system unit). You might like to use Jegsworks or an old but useful program in My Computer --> Apps called Computer Works. Store the information you collect in either a Word document or a PowerPoint presentation. Remember to say where your information came from, and use pictures to help you describe what you find out.

Extra for Experts

1. Explain why bits and bytes are important when comparing pieces of computer hardware.

2. What terms are used describe large quantities of bytes?

3. Can you find a way of showing the comparative sizes and speeds of different pieces of hardware?

4. Find a definition of programming that makes sense to you.

Year 10 Thursday Work

Morena, Year 10s!

I am at home sick - have no voice to talk to you with.

What I want you to do today and tomorrow is to work on Animation.
You will collect information and images and display them using PowerPoint.

Use the wikipedia page on animation to find the following

1. A definition of animation.
2. A list of techniques with one example of each.

Use the wikipedia page on computer animation to find the meaning of important terms

1. CGI
2. Key frames
3. Tweening
4. Rendering
5. Sprite

Use your computer's Start > All Programs to identify any software that can be used to make animations. Make a list of them and choose one to experiment with. An easy choice would be UnFREEz which you used in Year 9 - you made a series of frames in Paint and saved them as file type: gif, then put them in to UnFREEz. Other options are MovieMaker and Blender.

Plan and start to make a simple animation (no more than 10 frames) about one of these topics:

• The recent weather
• My favourite sport
• My hero!

Year 10 Friday Work

Ahi ahi marie, Year 10!

Your job today is to prepare for an activity we will do next week.
If you search my blog (this website) for "shark" you will find a shark story.
We will be making a quick video to tell this story next week using PhotoStory.
Your job today is to read the story and find pictures to tell it. You will need to save them in your home drive - make a folder called shark images in your multimedia folder to put them in to.
You will need pictures of high resolution - you can tell by looking at the file size.
Some images will be blocked - I wonder why?

PS you may like to draw some images of you own in either Paint or Art Rage. This is fine, but you will not have time to do the whole video this way.

Ethics

When you have finished your first project to the best of your ability, do these tasks.

1. Make a Word document to start with. Find a definition of ethics that make sense to you. Add the URL where you got it from.
2. Research The “Heinz dilemma” in Wikipedia and read the story. What do you think he should do and why? Write a paragraph explaining your decision and the reasons for it.
3. Find and read Kohlberg’s stages of moral development. Which stage do you think you are at and why? Write a paragraph about this.
4. Make a presentation using Power Point or Photostory that explains EITHER the Heinz story and the different levels of response OR a different ethical issue of your own choice. Be as creative as you can with graphics and sound and animation. Remember to acknowledge your sources of both information and images. You may use headphones but must return them tidily to the container at the end of the period.
5. If you complete all this work, have a look at career options at FutureInTech or Career Stories.

Colour - an on-going saga

I have just spent half an hour or so working through my PowerPoint presentations that I used to teach HTML in 2008. The first purpose was to find the website that I used about colour schemes - I love this one. The second benefit is that I now have my HTML teaching sequence compressed into one presentation - much more useful than having a sequence of presentations called Term Two Week One and so on!

So now my next step for colour is Color Theory Lesson 2

Deskchecking

As part of your assessment you will need to perform a deskcheck. To find out more about the Whys and Hows of deskchecking, use Topic 6 of the Visual Basic Moodle course. You don't necessarily need to do all the examples but you do need to convince me that you can deskcheck from pseudocode, and that you know how to deal with loops.

String Handling Part 2

Program Example 15 is also similar to a program we wrote in QBasic - the Sentence one. It counts the number of spaces to work out the number of words in a sentence. It also uses an array to keep track of how times each letter occurs in the sentence. New string functions are CHR and ASC.





Questions to answer:

1. What is a pangram?
2. What is ASCII?
3. Explain what CHR and ASC do and give some examples.
4. What is the significance of the ranges 65-90 and 97-122 in the comments of the blue-book-code?
5. Explain what the AddToArray subroutine does from the time it is called until it ends. You may find it helpful to your understanding to sketch the Letters array.

String Handling

Remember strings? They are the data type that holds letters, spaces, words and text. In QBasoc we used

1. LEN(mystring) to find the length of a string


2. LEFT$(mystring, x) to find the first x characters of a string


3. RIGHT$(mystring, x) to find the last x characters of a string


4. MID$(mystring, y, x) to find x characters of a string starting at position y

A common technique used with strings is to use a FOR loop to cycle through the letters in the string:

FOR i = 1 to LEN(mystring)

PRINT MID$(mystring, i, 1)

NEXT i

What are the equivalent techniques for these functions in Visual Basic? See Program Example 14 String Handling 1.

Style Guides

A style guide describes the way that set of pages (or documents) will be made to look as though they belong together. You can read what wikipedia has to say about style guides.

Things to think about when designing a style guide include:

• Colour scheme


• Font selections, including size, style etc


• Headings and sub-headings


• Page layout


• Page numbering


• Headers and footers


• Alignment

In your second project this year, you need to consider how to show clearly which of the following topics each page relates to: Skills (AS 90368), Project (AS 90349) or Community Responsibilities (AS 90773). Ways of doing this include

• Putting the text in either header or footer


• Using a different coloured page heading


• Printing on different colour paper


• Having an icon or graphic that represents the topic


• Using a table of contents and/or appendices


• Designing a page with a space for Skills, Project, and Community Responsibilities to use for all work.

Remember that for your style guide to help your readers, you (may) need to explain it - no point in having a code if you don't tell people what it means. However some people would argue that really good design does not need explaining...

Extra for Experts:

• Which sorts of technologists use style guides?
• Why do technologists use style guides?
• Can you find any style guides?
• What sort of things are included in style guides?
• How might your knowledge of style guides "inform your practice"?

Matrix

1. Find my version of the matrix program in iNet and have a play with it.
2. Can you fix the bug that has 1s and 2s showing up instead of 10s and 11s at one point?
3. Do the first three suggestions for consolidation in the blue booklet.
4. Describe how the cursor behaves in this program.
5. What other cursor options are there?
6. If you need to practice with random numbers and arrays do the tasks from the blue booklet.

Gantt Charts Part 2

Remember that one of the points of a Gantt chart is to show how your project developed over time. There are different ways of showing this. You may have

1. used a symbol to show when each job was done
2. used a colour code to show the actual time you spent on each task
3. written comments next to each task to explain changes you made
4. done nothing after printing the original Gantt chart.

If you did 1, 2, 3 or another sensible thing, you should print what you did.

If you did 4, you should hand-write notes on your print-out about how long each thing took and what changes you needed to make to your timeline.

Pseudocode Task

1. Log in to Moodle and find Programming -> Visual Basic (Enrolment code is Oscar)
2. Find topic on Pseudocode.
3. Read resources and write pseudocode for Craps – hand in on paper for marking.

Diagrams Task

1. Check the posters over Melanie’s and Jonathan’s computers to remind yourself of flow charts and structure diagrams.

2. Make a structure diagram to show the “big picture” of the Number Game 1 program. Don’t spend more than 10 minutes attempting this – then see me OR find and read the file Planning for Visual Basic Programs. Use this method to make a similar plan for the Number Game 1 program.

3. Make a flow chart to show the details of the Compare button code.

4. Hand in for marking.

Moving Buttons

The Moving Buttons program is very annoying!

You can find it in iNet --> DigiTech by searching or using your brain.

To make it work, copy it to your desktop (or your home drive if you want to keep it.)

Run it and experiment.

Copy the code into a Word document.

Use the coloured high-lighter tool and a key to identify which part of the code does each of the "learning goals" from the blue booklet.

Choose one part of the code (one sub-routine) to explain in English.

Hand it in for marking or talk to me about it!

Evaluation

There are two sorts of evaluation that you need to do:

1. Evaluating what you have created by commenting on each specification in your refined brief. You should give your own opinion and (if possible) opinion from stakeholders.


2. Evaluating your technological practice. See last year's blog post for details on this.

A third place where the word evaluation appears is in the Code of Practice sheets. In this case, it is asking you to provide evidence of how you have followed the rules for that Code of Practice.

Investigation

Once you have justified your best solution, you need to investigate it further.

This means that you will experiment with your chosen way of solving the problem.

The way you will experiment/investigate depends on the type of solution.

Questions to consider include:

• Will the solution I am suggesting do the job that the client wants?


• What features does the software have? How will they help you to meet the client's needs?


• What products are on the market that could meet your client's needs? How much do they cost?


• Will the people who have to use your solution find that it works for them? Does it fit their existing work patterns?


• What further information do I need to convince my client that this is their best choice?


• How does the software you are suggesting work? How easy is it to use?
• What are the limits of your proposed solution? For example, is there a maximum file size or a limit on the number of users or reduced functionality unless you pay?

Before asking for help on this one, write some of your own questions for investigation.

Features of a blog as a blog owner

When you own a blog there are different things that you can do to manage your blog.
For example, you can change the settings for comments. In Blogger, under Settings --> Comments you can

• show or hide comments
• control who is allowed to comment
• change how the comments are displayed
• turn word verification on or off
• and lots more!

When you are exploring your proposed solution, you should be looking at these sort of details as they will help to justify why your solution is "fit for purpose".

Managing your files!

Have just performed a mid-holiday rescue mission for a nameless class member who lost their USB stick and did not have a backup at home.


There is a well-known theory of insurance that states "no-one can ever afford all the insurance they should have." Backups are the same, and just like insurance, you only realise how important they are when you need them.


Until they invent a way of carrying your files around attached to your body, the chances of losing your storage device are significant. You should

1. Label your USB stick with your name


2. Put a file on your USB stick called yourname


3. Have a backup copy at school


4. Have a backup copy at home


5. Consider using an online storage facility or working on Google Documents.

Even a modern-day Swiss Army Knife can't stop you from leaving it behind!