With the AP Test in our rearview mirror, thousands upon thousands of lines of code written and potentially many frustrating nights, AP Computer Science A is now complete. Congratulations.

What to do with my students the rest of the year? Well, let me explain.

We have three types of students

1. Seniors leaving next Friday 5/13
2. Seniors not leaving next Friday and getting out earlier than others. 5/31
3. Not a senior, staying till the end. 6/10

That being said, the next few days together we’ll be a collection of students.

The goal for today is to review Multiple Choice Questions. Please do this anyway you feel is the best:

1. With a partner
2. Solo
3. Asking me questions when you have them

Notice, this post will self destruct at 9pm so please make use of these questions while they are live. For even more multiple choices, view Learnerator.com or the daily session reviews that so many of you DIDN’T do!

We’ll be starting our PixLab today. We have an introductory project/assignment/journey that requires you to find a partner, take some pictures and then determine which camera took it better.

Cameras are present in so many different modes of hardware. Tablets, computers, and phones are everywhere. Most people have the ability to take a photo of something on a daily basis. The idea behind a digital life is growing. Check out this site about digital footprints.

As crazy as it sounds, the concept of permanency is just that. A picture is currently saved on your HD, you share it with someone, regret the decision and then delete it. But who else has that picture? Where else has it been?

Our activity is less about digital footprints but more so about using those tools to create a positive one. So. Head to Classroom and let’s get this party started!

This week is going to stray from our normally scripted Blue Pelicaness. We are approaching our first big lab called PixLab and to help with that, we are going to work on learning binary, octal and hex. In addition, we are going to throw in the use of RGB too.

Our progression will be this:

1. Introduce numbers and such
   1. To help us with that: I’ve got a great little PDF located here.
   2. Complete the ending Exercise by Wednesday. Questions 1-30 and submit them to the Google Classroom
2. Next up, your TWIP will be due on Friday as always.
   1. The idea with this assignment is the user can enter either an RGB triplet (255, 65, 4), hexadecimal (f23ab2), or named color from the common 140 HTML colors located here.
   2. Once an input is received, the other 2 colors are outputted to the user. Think of it as a color converter.
   3. That is is it!

You are a VERY silly programmer. In fact, by silly you mean that you are hired by a bank to create a program to record bank account deposits. You’ve been asked to modify the program but your greedy hands couldn’t resist trying to modify it. You came up with this not-so-genius plan of draining bank account deposits and moving all deposits to your own Bank Account.

Here are the files you need!

• Starter code
• Directions

Good luck! http://quiz.cosmicsoft.net/3y32

Text messages are all the rage. Well maybe not a rage but they were back in my day. I feel that as I am turning 30 this year, I can now say things like:

• When I was your age
• Kids aren’t what they used to be
• My knee hurts when it rains
• I walked uphill to school, both ways and it snowed, everyday. Sometimes twice.

The concept of texting isn’t earth shattering but when companies started to use their own services, cell phone companies started getting more and more relaxed. Apple really made the cell phone industry angry when the released their iMessages in 2011. Think of how a message service works. Think of how your own phone is storing those messages. On mine, each message is grouped by contact. I don’t just have a running list of messages. Instead it resembles this:

• Bob
  • Hey what’s up
    • Nothing
  • Want to grab some food
    • Nah. You smell
  • Whatever
• Thelma
  • LOL
    • OMG
  • ROFL
• Liam
  • Hey Mr. P want to hear a story
• 215-328-4560
  • Hey Mr. P. I didn’t finish my homework yesterday because bears attacked me.
• Dane
  • What is your favorite food
    • Ice cream
    • Or pizza
  • Me too. I <3 food

As you can see from the above, the list of messages is grouped to follow a dialog. Bottom is the most recent. Additionally, you can see that each person is a sublist of my messages. Finally, you can see that students who have my number that text me never get a response.

Your goal this week will to be make a somewhat archaic version of an early SMS system. Looking for a challenge? Encrypt all messages with your own proprietary algorithm.

Well obviously we don’t have a full week ahead of us. As I write this, the marking period has NOT been extended by the two days we missed. That being said, we still have a significant grade…the unit 4 benchmark. Key the creepy music…

So here is our tentative schedule:

• Wednesday: Sorting follow up assignment. Details below
• Thursday: Review
• Friday: Unit 4 Benchmark
• Monday – Layne talks

Sorting assignment.

• You’ve been given a .txt file. Your job is to make that RELATIVE to your root folder. Please review that in either Blue Pelican or your notes from when we imported data.
• Your goal is to accept the input from the file, sort it and then output it to a new txt file. Again, keep the new txt file relative to your root.
• The challenge is that their are two columns. Please keep the name and the amount in the same row.
• Other things to keep in mind
  • You’ve already created the sorting methods so choose which one you want to use.
  • Think about the data structure.
  • Don’t use Arrays.sort
  • Sort it by the user preference of either by Name or by Check Amount
  • Due by Layne Talks on Monday

Ok…you have what you need. Make it happen cap’n. 

So if an effort to teach our first true algorithm, I am designating this post as the table of contents for all things sorting.

We’ll begin by introducing you all to your own version of how you sort things.

Our sorting page is listed here and will be available the next day!

Rejoice! http://quiz.cosmicsoft.net/3wsu