Program Stress!!!

Well here we go again. Once again I have put off my homework till nearly the last minute and I've done this for almost all of the programming assignments. I thought by now I would realize that getting this homework done early would prove useful to me, but apparently I never took action. Currently my program can successfully put the snake, player, and money buttons in random places on the JButton grid, but it doesn't do anything else. I realize that this program is going to involve a listener and a manager and I need to either read up on the subject or go take a visit to the learning center because I am somewhat lost on how to accomplish my tasks. If I can get this program working at least halfway correctly it puts my final grade in good shape especially with all these blogs, but I can't lose my focus on this program.

Lab Quiz 3...Success!!!

After lots of preparation for our last lab quiz on Tuesday I found that hard work really does pay off, but it wasn't easy when looking at it in the context of my scenario. Surprisingly I did very well on the question about maps as it only took about 5 minutes to complete and the first question was pretty easy as well. The second question which dealt with ArrayLists stressed me out a bit when I kept getting errors. It turns out that I was over complicating the entire problem and I just had to clear my mind and start over from scratch on that problem. The final problem actually wasn't too hard to figure out especially with my preparation, but I probably approached the problem in the most complex way imaginable. When I finished the problem I had about 200 lines of code, but the important thing is that I got that correct and got 100% on the overall quiz!

Lab Quiz 3 Preparation

This weekend I chose to be lazy and not work on the program and I am not ashamed to admit that because I actually did do something CS related that was productive. Since the third and final lab quiz is on Tuesday I thought it would be in my best interest to look over programs from the lab and comment them out to try and study for this important quiz. I mainly focused on labs 9 and 10 which was the new stuff after lab quiz 2 and commented those programs out so I could follow the entire logic flow. Although I did not go through all the labs, I was able to get a considerable amount of studying done for labs 9 and 10. On Monday and Tuesday I plan to go over the other labs.

Obscure much?....

The last few lectures have been about more obscure topic like inheritance and superclasses which rely more on understanding concepts as opposed to syntax. For some reason the extends keyword used when defining classes actually made a lot of sense to me as it simply just imports all the methods of another class into the current class. I was probably able to understand this lecture because I actually went through the book and went through all the example code in the book to be sure I understand the whole logic flow. Although homework program 5 isn't due till next Friday I plan on getting a good chunk of it done because I don't want to wait until the last minute like I did for the last two programming assignments.

THE LAST LAB!!!

Tuesday was another one of those CS filled days where I had class and then lab that evening. We did not really go through much code at all during class we basically just went through some conceptual stuff on java classes and whatnot. There was also a lecture quiz that was simpler than simple because Dr. Poplawski gave us an obvious hint to the answer, but it was still much appreciated. The lab was about graphical user interfaces and my partner and I had quite a few struggles. Setting up the GUI and giving it a size, placing objects in the window, and giving it a title was no problem whatsoever, but the code for the listener is what I struggled with. My partner and I only got through the first problem, but I still learned quite a few things about listeners. Now my next course of action is going to be studying for the lab quiz that takes place next week and I'm just gonna go through all my old labs and make sure I follow each step of the logic flow.

Upcoming game....I mean program...

As I went onto the CS1121 homepage I found that homework 5 was available and I took a gander at it. The program going to be based off the game snake and it will involve the use of graphical user interfaces and it sounds like it will be a pretty fun program to make. Being anxious to start it, I have already done a few things with the code. I have already made the JFrame and JButton objects as well as initialized the size of the frame and made the frame visible. The game itself is a grid with a specified amount of JButton objects and I have the user input the amount of rows and columns that will be used in the game and I add the JButton objects to the frame accordingly. The JButton objects have a defined size in this game, so I have made a for loop that adds all JButton objects that can possibly be added. I'm sure Dr. Poplawski will talk more about the program on Tuesday, but I thought it would be best to get a head start on it.

Program Finished!

When the lecture on Thursday ended I felt pretty confident about my program because I had written 3 of the methods and my partner had written the other 2 and the toString method. However, when we went to the CS labs after class we had to some debugging in some of the methods in order for it to store the values and cities correctly. It turns out that after only about an hour of work all the methods were as correct as I could get them to be. When I was reading over the documentation of the methods in the RouteMap class I had realized that I forgot to put the error code associations inside all the methods so I had to go through and apply those to the methods. The real problem that I faced was getting the toString method to work correctly. On Friday I spent a total of about 3 hours in the CS labs asking learning center coaches for their assistance and trying to get it to output correctly. I put forth my best effort, but I got the toString method to only partially work.