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.