Alice grows, then reduces

I never liked Lewis Caroll.  Alice In Wonderland is just creepy as all get out. 
Following the instructions page 117-118, we did this fun little exercise:

I still don't like the way her arm looks broken.  I went through all the code and it is correct.  If you look in the initial set up, in the beginning, her arm looks busted there, too.  Maybe it was when she took a face plant the first time I tried to make her touch the flower.

Making our Alice programs in to viewable vids

Tonight we went through a powerpoint presentation going over all of the programming concepts from chapter 2, including:

The four processes of programming:  Design, Implement, Test, Debug (and as our professor says, finalize.)
Tonight we used Alice 2.2 to export our homework project 2 to a .mov file.

We also went through the steps in programming, which was Algorithm, then module, then methods.

We talked about bottom up development and Top down development.  If you think of a book plan, or a hierarchy, that makes sense.

We talked about documentation, including identifying the code, the specifications for the program, and any other instructions.

Then we went in to Alice, took our Project 2 files and exported them to movie format (File, Export - follow the instructions but take it slowly because Alice takes her time crunchin'.)

We are Programming in Alice 2.0!

We are working with Alice 2.0 (2.2 since the latest upgrade) to learn programming.  At first, I thought it was a little hokey, but I knew it was going to be better for me to learn visually.  The dashboard for the program looks like something out of 1993:

So here we go.  The upper left corner contains the objects list for use in the world that is created in the middle pane.  The lower left corner shows the properties and pre-written code, called "methods" and "functions", displayed in tiles that can be dragged into the Programming pane, like a storyboard.

I worked tonight with Samantha in class and we had a good giggle over creating a man using the "Hemaker" feature. 

I feel pretty comfortable with this simple program, and I like how you can playback the program at different stages.  At one point, I had made our man, Nigel, walk forward three paces, turn, and face Zena.  When I played it back, only Nigel's legs moved.  I was able to troubleshoot right away.  But I had to laugh watching Nigel move torso-less toward Zena.  We replayed that a few times before I changed it.

Meantime, I will have to troubleshoot over the weekend why she keeps saying the same thing over and over and over.  It seems to be looping.  I will play with it and see if I can fix it.



Wow! We did a LOT! Notes from week 3 class

Notes from this week's blogger new elements. 9/21: 
Tonight we made pages and had them run in tabs across the top. 
We learned you can have only one post per page. 
We learned how to embed a video, and then go back and edit the HTML to reduce the height and width for a video or an image. 
We embedded a video in the sidebar, not using the video gadget but the Text gadget. 
We added a blog list, which I really like because it picks up the blog of the name.  In the blog list is a blog that Prof. Morris introduced to us made by Boutros AbiChedid, with lots of useful resources on web storage.  I'll have to check it out.

Simplicity with John Maeda at TED

Second Post

Hoo boy.  I'm really bloggin' now.

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