The Cheating Blogger aka BurntOrange11

Other than having a similar blog plagarize a lot of content from this blog, this week went pretty well for us. This is the last work week we're going to have before next semester starts, and possibly the start of new projects. We don't know what's going to happen to our group after this semester, but I'll probably still work on Android. Aside for this, we got the menu to work. Before we went about making a separate button and implement our own code to that particular button to give it the ability to reset the game. After failing to do that, we went about doing it the tutorial's way. In the tutorial, the items were included in the "menu" which not a physical button on the app, but the menu button on the phone itself. This allowed the app to have a "new game" option next to the "settings options". The "new game" pretty much works but now we're going to have to find a way to implement this, along with difficulty levels and a "quit game" to be clickable on the screen itself.

Making Progress

Last week was undoubtedly the single-most productive week I've had. Even though 2 weeks ago, we had finally gotten our app to work, this week we got the computer NOT to cheat. We fixed the issue about it playing over us, or taking additionaly turns. Plus the text field at the bottom, which is still a text field which is not we want to it to be, works flawlessly. It actually realizes who the winner in different situations and displays it. Even if its a tie, we can tell. The big issue which we still have to do a bit of work on is our checkforwinner() method. We haven't been able to connect this method with the computer making its move, so pretty much the computer makes random moves instead of determining the best move possible and playing there accordingly. We've been working to add the menu and the start new game within the game itself instead of restarting the app every time we want to play the game again. Finally, in the distant future we will want to implement level difficulty.

The Cheating Android

This week we had a computer scientiest voluteer to come over to our class and help us out. His name was Todd Manning, a young man who lives in Austin, who works for a company in Denver. He is a computer scientist who works with Android and has made two apps already. We had accumulated several errors over the span of the tutorial and were confused on how to resolve those issues, this was where he came in. He looked at our code, going through all the logic and pinpointed our errors. With his expertise in this field we were able to debug our TicTacToe project of all the programming errors. He taught us a new way to find errors which involved using the debug program within eclipse. We ended up fixing all the issues and finally after weeks of trying to debug the program ourselves we were able to run our project. It was beautiful. The red x's and green o's appeared perfectly on the screen wherever we clicked, as we had been hoping. Everything was going well, until halfway through the game, the bottom textfield stated "Android wins!". Ignoring the issue, we were about to win the game, when suddenly the computer replaces one of our spots, with his own. We were shocked to see this and then finally the computer just stopped playing the game as if accepting its victory. We're definitely going to have to stop this cheating android.

eRRoRs in R

Our group didn't have any time to work on thanksgiving break because of longhorn Monday. This was pretty much a college visit for ut Austin so we got to miss school. However we did work the week before on tictactoe. We've come to the borderline of our project: we're so close to finishing. There are only a few issues remaining in which we're really confused about. There were around three errors by the time we had completed the tutorial. We asked Mr. Stephen's for help and we fixed one of the errors using his advice of changing a method and the return statement to an integer. So that was just a minor error but another one has left us all puzzled. It's an error of eclipse not knowing what one variable is, information. Thequick fix would be to define it in the r method but whenever we try editing the method and save it, the changes we made revert back. The problem is that we can't make changes to this method since it's pre made. We'll just have to wait until next week to see how we can   fix these errors.

Game Logic vs UI Logic

The tic-tac-toe project we've been working on requires mastery of two different areas: game logic and UI logic. Game logic, so far, has been incorporated with JAVA and has been how the game runs, in other words. UI logic, or user-interface logic, deals with more of the android code. We need to use xml to code the buttons and textfields the user gets to interact with. We've only been working on this for a while now, since the majority of the six weeks was put into the SQLite which we're moved away from. After learning that SQLite was way later down the road in the android course at UT, we decided we weren't experience enough to handle it. Instead this, tic-tac-toe game is one of the first projects that even the UT professor teaches his own kids. 

Tic-Tac-Toe 3-in-a-row

Since the beginning of the school year we've been completing different tutorials on Android. Now our group is funneling down to one project, provided by the UT professor, Mike Scott. This project is Tic Tac Toe as an android app. Sure we may be able to do this simply in JAVA, but the catch to android app development is that we're going to have to make two seperate "logics": game logic and UI logic. We're still going through the project and haven't been caught up in any problems yet. Mike Scott has also a lot of content available so as soon as we've finished the Tic-Tac-Toe to our liking, we can move on to the next project. His projects are meant for his class so if this is a method to teach college students, I hope we also gain college-level knowledge.

Second Time Through

This week was another code-review week since we're coming to the end of the second six weeks. I got to see Stephen's code which was pretty interesting because his game had this preset internal structure and all he had to do was make the functioning game itself. It had the main screen outline as well as interactive option buttons, which is something I wanted my android app to also have. However, his was some kind of "Japanese C" code so it was pretty new to me. I'm going to have to show him our team's code because it's not on the aisd computers, but on a laptop which was present Friday. It's alright since we still have some time to go until the end of the six weeks. As for our project, I'm actually starting to get the idea and just going through the tutorial at a slow and steady pace actually lets me learn the stuff, instead when I was rather just skimming the tutorial resulting in multiple errors.

From Half Days to Internet Crashes

As expected, we barely had anytime this week to work on our project. From internet crashes to days cut short by the PSAT, both days had some type of time constraint. I did get work done on my tab layout app though. I also tuned into the conversation about networking and its future at LASA. I also observed students making cables, stripping the covering and fitting them into the ends. We are making further progress on our phone directory app also. We're learning about SQL, or structured query language, which is used to communicate with a database. We are still testing this out, but the ideal situation would be us learning how to implement our own specific database. Then we would be able to associate this app a bit more with our unique needs such as inputting a LASA directory.

Approaching Multiple Tutorials

This week our group had been working on two different tutorials. Reason is that if one becomes to complicated or if we wish to discontinue the tutorial, we have a backup to start working on immediately. One of the tutorials includes a phone directory of some sort where our group is modifying the tutorial to fit our own needs, for example, turning the text to purple and adjusting some other factors. The other tutorial includes a tab layout tutorial hopefully teaches us how to implement the use of tab switching in our app. As I look forward to next week, I realize that we're going to have very limited time because 1) we only have two workdays, and 2) Wednesday's going to be cut extremely short due to the underclassmen taking the PSAT.

Sharing our Knowledge

This week we continued working on our project, and made a bit of progress partially due to having only 1 work day. On Wednesday, the entire class period was devoted to presentations where everyone in the class taught each other about what they've done so far and what they plan on doing in the future. I did my presentation with LB and BB. We all took a share in the presentation and I feel we did pretty good. We mentioned that we still have a lot of work to do before we can achieve the ability to make our own unique app. What we said was right, and is what we plan on doing for the next couple of weeks.

Tutorial Progress

Even though, we had missing group members almost everyday of the week we still made quite a bit of progress. Starting Monday, I began skimming through all the tutorials, determining which one would serve my best interest. I discovered one website which had step-by-step instructions on how to make a "name-getter" app where the user would be asked for their name and I'm guessing the app would save the input, yes a very simply app. But this is only to build a foundation for our further apps, because we barely know anything about app development as of now. By Wednesday there was this nasty error which probably came from skipping parts of the tutorial, and by the time the app should have been finished, my code had some seriously weird errors from the "id's" I named the different sections of the app. I would have attempted to resolve those on Friday, but since I wasn't there, it'll have to wait until next week. However, my teammates have found another tutorial website which I'll be looking more into in the upcoming week.

The Day of Revision

Today was the first time we completed the code review. This is a review where you and a partner exchange codes and attempt to explain the code to one another. My review partner, Stephen Ngo, was working with C# with the XNA 4.0 Mainframe on Visual Studio and accomplished a couple of tutorials and began working on his longer-term project. I made a couple of suggestions such as changing the icons, clearing up the screen a little, and making sure more than one bullet can stay on the screen at one particular instance. Next week I'll be beginning a few more tutorials/ example apps to get an idea of what I'm capable of achieving in Android app development. I have an android myself which means that I can test the app on my phone in addition to the app simulator on the computer.

 

3,2,1...Preparing for Development

Last week in independent study was quite an adventure. On Monday, we started to make progress since we had our teacher download the SDK and othe other developer tools we needed. We've been downloading all the required files to begin developing an android app. Downloading all of these files took such a long time mainly because we were unaware of how the entire process worked, and the trick was that student accounts didn't have permission to download the necessary files. That had us stuck for a while since it simply said it wasn't downloadable instead of stating we didn't have the permission. Finally, after downloading the files from an Admin account, on Friday we made our first hint of progress. We researched various resources to find out how we would go about doing the project. We're probably going to make our first app an example app and see what all designer tools we have in hand. Then we feel a bit more confident, we'll go about making our unique app.

Beginning of the End...

Independent study class is very closely associated with the advanced programming class which means we'll have to do many similar tasks. The grading method we all came up with was reasonable and resemble's past year's rubrics so there's not much of a difference. Most of what we're graded on is what we choose to do independently or in groups. The project we choose is mostly going to carry on throughout the semester. What we're planning on doing right now is Android App development. Now this could change any time, but for now, it's what we're attempting to do. The hard part of the development is gathering all the resources and  equipment needed to start the actual coding. Downloading SDK, eclipse, add-ons, have taken up most of our time for now, but by the end of this week we should get a feel of how things should turn out.