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http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-12/simple-tentacle-prosthesis-gets-grip-keep-functioning-hand-free

This is absolutely fascinating. Forgoing standard practice, a young inventor has created a tentacle-like arm that does exactly what a prosthesis is supposed to do: augment the actions of the other human arm in order to allow it to look after more complex tasks while the prosthesis takes care of larger more simple tasks. This wonderful example of the elegance of simplicity works well will the world of programming, in which everyone is always trying to come up with better, faster ways to get things done.

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Today I will be talking about compound conditionals. These are when you have multiple conditions that must be met before an action can be put into place, like an if or while statement. These are quite simple if you understand how single conditionals work. All you have to do is use the parentheses and brackets correctly! Sounds easy right? NO. It is not. It is a horrible pain in the (word mommy said not to use in public.) This seems to be the bane of programmers, who have an aversion to work proven by their constant striving for shorter, better ways to get things done. The only way I can recommend to fix chronic removal of vital but uninteresting syntax is lots and lots and lots of practice. However, compound conditionals themselves, such as ((isFlower(AHEAD)) || (isFlower(RIGHT))) are quite simple but extremely useful I finished the labs related to them with no problems.

Revision Post

This week I first finished off the Alice assignments I had been given, loops and lists and other items, with absolutely no problems. Alice seems to be quite simple and unhelpful for anyone at a higher level than novice, yet I think it has been moderately beneficial to the less experienced students in our class. However, I feel that it was a bit too prolonged, done at the wrong time, and overall a bit of a time waste. Alice is not quite the simplest teaching program (Scratch, which I thought was very well done and enormously beneficial to novice programmers) and not quite a teaching program almost at the Java level (Jeroo, which again was very good due to its code being so similar to java without the complex programming involved). It seemed a bit unnecessary, a bit out of place. I think the class was fairly prepared to move on to Jeroo after Scratch, without taking what seemed like the extra stop at Alice. Overall, I believe a better time table for the class would have been a similar amount of Scratch (perhaps slightly more,) then a bit more on Jeroo, then real Java or perhaps a simpler but equally real language like visual basic. I think that the main point of Alice was to teach object-oriented programming, but Jeroo did that very well with the jeroo’s. However, Alice was good for one thing: cool animated sequences for people who had finished the assigned work. I made two large armies consisting of robots and dinosaurs battle it out on an epic scale. I can do some pretty cool things when I'm really tired. Hopefully lessons for real java will be compiled quickly so I can move on to them. Would it be possible to receive an ETA for those, not counting the rather basic “println” introductory programs? The reason I chose regular computer science was because I hoped that instead of just learning what I needed for the AP exam, I could experiment and play around with whatever my imagination threw out, which is the fun of programming. I recognize that others in my class are not at an advanced level yet and they need to go at their own pace, but it would be nice to have lessons completed on all levels so students could go at whatever pace they are comfortable with. Overall, the class has been rather entertaining but I am eager to begin real java and actually do things I have never done before.

Revision Post