Joe's CSUMB Computer Science Blog

    This week, we were assigned several coding problems on Coding Bat. These problems dealt topics such Strings, logic, and some data structures.     I thought the Coding Bat challenges were pretty simple, and I was able to finish the problems quickly. The one thing that slowed me down on certain problems was not understanding what kind of input the methods would receive. I answered the Coding Bat problems by throwing code at it, and it worked most of the time. If I answered a problem incorrectly, it was because I did not account for all types of acceptable input. Whenever this happened, I would go back and adjust the code to work for the kind of input that broke my code. Most attempts were successful on the first attempt, but I think there were a couple problems that took 3 attempts. In general when I am working with more difficult problems, I start by planning out how I will approach the problem and then I will throw code at it to test my approach to the problem.

Part 1: Review Other Teams' final video projects Seawolves https://youtu.be/VHa5m3_r3Jk      I thought this group's video was very well put together. They explained the history of the company and how certain events caused the company's goals to shift. The events that led to the changes in OpenAI were presented clearly so that the audience understood the story behind it. I thought the research in this video was in depth. I think the group's research is evident in how they could provide details on key players in the company. This video informed the audience of the roles these key players had and the events they were involved in. Overall I thought this video felt like a mix between a tech research paper and a current events paper (in a good way). I was able to learn about OpenAI and was drawn into the story about the growth of the company. Considering that there were only 2 people in this group, I assume a great deal of teamwork went into this project. Between the informat...

Part One      My group planned the video project through discord. We collaborated and assigned tasks by sending messages in our group chat, since some of us were too busy for a group call. Rene drafted an outline for our video to follow and we each volunteered to cover topics on the outline. Our current plan is to record our own videos for each topic. After this we will need to figure out how we will edit the videos together. This process has been smooth so far, and I think we will continue to work on projects this way for now. Part Two     This week, I was able to learn/refresh on some information about presentations. Visual aids can improve a presentation or ruin a presentations depending on how they are used. I think it is important to use visual aids that are visually appealing, but do not distract the audience. This information along with the rubric for the video project should help our group create an informative video that can also keep the attention of t...

  Part 1: Help Your Teammates to Develop Capstone Ideas      This week, my group mates and I discussed two possible ideas for capstone projects at the end of this course. The first idea was to develop a 2D platform game. This idea is personally my favorite. Even if this product is not chosen by the group, I have an interest in video games, and this may be a project I work on in my personal time. I may also look into making mods for the open sandbox video game Minecraft Java as well in the future. The second idea discussed were projects that use AI. A project we thought about was to create a program to transcribe handwriting. We believe that this type of program would be practical for many people to use across a variety of occupations. These are just some of the first ideas that came to mind, so we may go in a different direction with our project later on.   Part 2: Keep Up With Your Learning Journal      I felt much more comfortable this week usin...