June 2020 archive

Computer tech – Final blog post

For computer tech, our last project was to make a game design on Scratch. I chose to make the pong game. One of the hardest parts was adding the score. I tried it multiple times, but still nothing was working. Eventually, I realized I had to put the score variable in a specific “forever” bracket in order for it to work. I am very proud of this game. One thing I am very proud about is that I was able to add many components to make this game even more advanced. For example, I added a score and timer. If I had more time, I would add more levels. In each level, the ball would bounce much faster. 

    I also played someone else’s game. Their game was a maze. I decided to play this one because it was not the game I decided to make. One thing I liked about the game was how the sprites were not the original ones you would use for a maze. The person made their sprite a donut, which I thought was pretty cool. One thing I learned from the game is that you can draw your own background. I knew we could use shapes to make it, but never knew that you could hand draw it. Overall, it was an amazing game!

    Like I said, this is the last project for computer tech, and the school year is almost done. Overall, I loved this class. It opened me to a whole new world of coding I never knew before. My favorite project was Swift Playgrounds: “Learn to Code”. I liked this because it taught me the fundamentals of coding, but did it in a fun and engaging way. I think one thing that worked well doing computer tech at home was that we had easy access to the basic materials we needed. I only needed my school iPad for this quarter. One thing that was a little hard was not being able to see the teacher in person and not being at the classroom. This is because it is easier to learn in the classroom than online, and there are more materials to help us there. However, I still think e-learning was fine.

    Overall, computer tech has been amazing! I have learned so many things that I will not forget, and it helped me grow tremendously as a coder!

Computer tech- spreadsheets

The topic we are doing in computer tech is spreadsheets and how to use them. For one of our projects, we were given data from real life situations. We had to pick one of them to focus on. I decided to focus on the snow totals spreadsheet. This included the snow totals in each US state. Once we picked a spreadsheet, we were supposed to use our spreadsheet knowledge and add things like charts, averages, and more.

 Here is what I did:

The first thing I did was add a chart. I did this by highlighting all the state’s numbers. Once everything was highlighted, I added it by clicking on the plus sign in the top right corner and choosing the chart option. Once I did this, I was able to choose what type of chart I preferred. I chose a 3D pie chart. I also added some formulas. I can do this by first highlighting the state’s amounts. After that, on the suggestions panel, there were the average, sum, minimum, and maximum. I chose the sum, minimum, and maximum. I also changed the cell color, font, and font size by clicking the “A” in the top right corner. I also froze the header row. I did this by clicking the row, and scrolling through the options until I found “freeze row”.

Overall, I think spreadsheets were a very interesting and fun topic!