Entry #1: 10/21/20

Computer Science 1 has been a really great learning experience so far. While there is a lot to learn, I feel that I am taking something out of this class. The fact that one small mistake can mess up your entire code can be extremely frustrating. On top of this, since there is a steep learning code to coding, I sometimes feel as if I am a little bit overwhelmed. I have learned the basics of html and javascript. Specifically, I have been working on a codesketch where when you hover over a colored box, it rotates into a picture that represents part of who I am. Thus far, while I cannot say that I understand every single thing, I would say that I have a general understanding of what we are learning. I especially think that labs really help enhance my comprehension of skills. Labs also provide a space for me to develop my own codesketch and brainstorm ways to fix my code and make it even better. They also allow me to do things that I had difficulty doing on my own such as getting my codesketch on a website. Group labs also help foster a collaborative nature in the class which I really like. Overall, labs allow me to work on computer science in a more personalized setting which provides a plethora of benefits. Moving forward, there are so many different ideas that I am excited to pursue. These ideas include:

• Doing some sort of codesketch relating to Park city where I can take pictures on the mountain and people can click on different parts of the map to see what a trail looks like.
• Doing some sort of game where you try to get a ball into a basket.
• Doing some sort of digital escape room code, where people need to solve riddles to escape.
• Doing some sort of travel guide of places that I have been to. This would have some sort of interactive map of the city where you would be able to click on a certain part of the map and there would be a picture of my experience there.

I cannot wait to make these ideas and more into a reality(I am not sure if that is plausible, but we shall see). I really love that there is a lot of choice in this class and I plan to take advantage of that and do projects that are really interesting to me. I cannot wait to learn more!

Entry #2: 11/2/20

Tomorrow is election day. As someone who spent a lot of time phone banking this election, I am anxiously awaiting for the results to start to come out. During these crazy times, coding my website has been really fun. I view the time I spend coding differently than other homework assignments, because I find it very enjoyable. One reason for this is that I get to style and customize my website as I wish. It is extremely satisfying to see my vision of a website turn into a reality right in front of my eyes. That being said, it was more difficult than I anticipated. A lot of times, I was confused why something looked the way that it did on my website. While I understood that if something was appearing on my website, it was also in my code, finding what was wrong with my code proved challenging. Overall, even through the frustrating times, coding this website was a great experience as I learned a lot and had a lot of fun.

Entry #3: 11/16/20

I am a little bit stressed out right now since I have a lot of work, but coding my website has been very fun. I am at a point with my website, where I like almost everything about it, but I still need to fix a few small things to make it even better. It can be really frustrating to try to figure out how to change something. That being said, when you do figure it out, it feels so satisfying. Something that I learned this week was how to use my previous codes to make the code that I am working on the best that it can be. When I do not know how to do something, I now look back to my previous codes to see if I knew how to do it in the past. This can be really helpful as sometimes I realize that it was an extremely minor mistake that was causing my code to not turn out how I wanted it to. Overall, while there are some frustrating experiences, programming my website has been an amazing experience.

Entry #4: 11/24/20

Making a gift for my grandma was really fun and I cannot wait to see how she reacts to it. It is super cool that I am able to use the skills that I am learning from this class to hopefully make her day. In my code, I start by making two divs. One of the divs, named blank, is the box where the random message will be and the other div, named heart, is the box with the heart. I then write a paragraph above the two divs. After that, in order to randomize my message, I start by writing out all of the messages that I want to be displayed. I then define a variable named box and get the element blank(the div), as I want the randomization to happen in this box. Next, I add an event listener so that the code can detect when someone clicks on the div “blank.” Finally, I make a function that randomizes one of the 7 messages(0 through 6) from the array, and writes it in the box. Overall, this codesketch was probably my favorite one to make and I am really happy with how it came out.

Entry #5: 12/9/20

Making this codesketch was really difficult because my code had a mistake that I could not identify. While it was extremely frustrating, it was a good learning experience. Also, after the problem was solved, I really liked the end result.

Enrty #6: 1/26/21

My first idea about timing how long I spend on homework for each class did not work as well as I imagined. I continuously forgot to start my timer. This led to results that were not accurate. Since I was still interested in this idea of seeing which classes give the most homework, I thought of a better way to accomplish this goal. I decided to create a google form and have people put which class gives the most homework. Obviously, I am not expecting people to time how long they are spending on homework in each class. Instead, people will just guess what they think they spend the most time on. Additionally, I thought it would be interesting to know why people spend the most time doing their homework for a specific class. Does that class assign homework the most? Is the homework in that class the hardest? Are people less efficient completing homework for that class? Additionally, instead of just focusing on the class that gives the most homework, I was wondering how much time people spend on homework overall compared to how much time they spend on their phone. Thus, I created a google form with all of these questions and I am going to make a codesketch with the data. Also, as someone who is interested in politics, I was curious about what was the biggest issue for most people in the 2020 general election. Specifically, as someone who is passionate about climate change, I wanted to know how many people thought climate change was the biggest issue in the election. I put this question on the google form as well in addition to a question that asked why this was the most important issue for that person. These results will also be made into a codesketch.

Entry #7: 2/11/21

I am working on my project where I am using the data I collected about what the most important issue in the 2020 general election was for people, and why that is the most important issue for them. I start by putting in a background image, and then I make the div where the issues will appear. Then, I write out a paragraph that goes above the div so people know what the codesektch is doing. Next, I make one array listing all of the issues that I received on my survey, but I put the issues that I received more on the survey more times in the array. For example, since 3 people put climate change as the most important issue to them, I put climate change three times. I then made a second array that matched the first array, but put .html at the end. This is because. When an issue comes up, I eventually want it to bring you to a page about why people care about this issue. After that, I add an event listener to the div. Finally, I create a function that randomizes a number between 0 and 13, before putting the corresponding thing from the array in the div, and the corresponding thing.html in the consol.

Entry #8: 3/16/21

I haven’t written in this journal for a while, but I am really proud of the last two codesketches that I created. They were both based on data that I collected. One was about the issues people cared about the most in the 2020 general election(I talk about this in my last journal entry, but I was not finished when I wrote that), and the other about which class gives the most homework. With my codesketch about the issues people cared about most in the 2020 general election, I was really interested in what issues people at Dalton would care about most and why. It was super cool to make a codesketch relating to something that I am very passionate about in real life: politics. As I said in my presentation, I phonebanked because it was my way to be involved in the political system since I was too young to vote. Specifically, the most important issue to me is climate change, because if we do not act now, it will be too late to act in the future. I wanted to make sure that there was someone in the white house that acknowledged climate change and would make sure the government did their role in combating the climate crisis. I really care about combating climate change(I also care about other issues - I just care about climate change the most), but I wanted to see what issues other people cared about. Thus, I decided to collect data and make a codesketch about the issues people cared about most in the 2020 general election. I also wanted to represent the data in a way so that it was very clear which issues people cared about and why. I also wanted to ensure that there was some element of randomization, but that the issues that more people cared about would appear more. For this reason, I made my codesketch randomize an issue proportional to how many people thought that was the most important issue. Next, it links to a page with quotes about why people thought that it was the most important issue. Overall, I am proud of the code, and I find it super cool that I can apply my passions to computer science. As for the last codesketch I made about homework, I was also curious about which class people thought gave the most homework. I definitely expected a majority of people to pick history, so that was not surprising. However, I was expecting more than two people to not pick history. For this codesketch, I wanted people to understand how many people picked history as the class that gives the most homework. To do this, I created cubes which makes it very clear that almost everyone chose history. This visual representation helps highlight the main take away from the data that I collected. Overall, this has been a phenomenal year in computer science. I had a lot of fun and moments of frustration when I could not figure something out. Looking back, I learned a lot and it was an extremely enjoyable experience.