Thursday May 28: UberGeek SoundOff

Greetings, fellow JavaNoidz!

In a recent class, there was a happy accident whereby two completely different ideas met in the luxuriant garden that is my mind, fell in love and gave birth to a third idea that combines the two. The first was that I had asked each of you to post to our discussion group some sense of what it means to you personally to be involved with computer programming, ie, "what's it all good for?" The second was that a few of you had casually mentioned that even though we've meeting right next door to it, and even though you've been attending this school for this entire year, and perhaps more years than one, you had never even seen the inside of the radio production rooms next door to this class.

What has sprung in my ever-moving and often randomly creative mind is that today, for those of you who are interested, I would like to give each of you a brief tour of the facility, and perhaps give you a brief run through with the equipment. This can only take place if ALL of us agree to the following conditions:

A) I cannot take in the entire class at one time. At best, I can get four of you in at a shot

B) Those of you who are awaiting your turn or have finished it need to work quietly and appropriately in our class on your projects

C) If you wish to make a brief recording, it should be on a topic related to this class and MUST be school appropriate at all times

D) Naturally, you must be respectful and careful of the equipment. All computers are worthy of respect, whether they have microphones attached to them or not.

If we can all agree to that, I think that this would be a good experience for all. I have had many other students from outside the radio class take part in similar projects, and it has been extremely helpful in promoting the unique resources we have here at HHS. Since most of you are in the 9th or 10th grade, it may even be that you will be interested enough to take one of the Radio classes offered here, since you will be here for at least another 2 or 3 years

Please undertsnad that there is nothing in the least bit mandatory about any of this, and if this is an activity in which you have no interest, you are not required to take part. You will have to stay in the regular classroom however, as I think running down the hall screaming like a nut would probably attract undue attention.

So, let's look at some new technology, m'OK?

Cheers,
Uncle Paulie

Thursday May 21: so what's it all good for?

Greetings, Javaneited gentlemen!



Towns, cities and states all across America are screaming for money to run various different programs, and some of these have to do with education. Technology instruction is part of education, so what we do here in this class -- and in future classes-- is affected by all this. So what I'm asking you to think about and then write into a group discussion post is this: what's it all good for? How do we justify spending money on technology instruction? How do we keep classes that we already have and try to offer more?



What I would like each of you to do is to write a group discussion post of at least two paragraphs of at three complete sentences each detailing why you believe that what we do here is important, and what we can say convince others of the basic value of what we're all about. As part of that, let's try to discuss ways in which the technologies we pursue can actually save money, for everyone, not just us. Additionally, let's try to discuss what each of us believes to be the items that should be part of any program of technology instruction.


After that, you can continue with your game projects,


cheers,
Mr. L

Tuesday May 19th: for the record!

Greetings one and all,

Today, I have a somewhat different request...I'll tell you what it is, then I'll explain why I need this done:

A) I will need you to email me as an attachment the latest copy of your current project. Along with this attachment, as a paragraph in the main body of the email, I will need a description of how to do ONE thing in this program, in a "step by step" fashion

B) the reason I need this is because I want to "film" your program in action, doing the thing you said that it can do. I have a program to record this, and I wish to make a brief video of each of your programs

OK, let's get on with that, so i can get filming and yopu can keep coding

Cheers,
Mr. L