Digital Currents 2009

Wednesday June 11

2009-06-17T13:52:00.000-07:00

Day 13-

Today was another work day. I finished all of the functional aspects of my project that I wanted to get done, and have all of tomorrow to improve graphics and make it look good. I spent most of my day making the graph and am extremely pleased with it.

Tuesday June 16

2009-06-16T12:55:00.000-07:00

Day 11-

There isn't much to say about today. It was a straight up work day. However, our speaker from Google was intersting and explained a lot about what he does and how the company and different products of theirs work.

Monday June 15

2009-06-15T16:01:00.000-07:00

Day 11-

So today we started our week at Google! We jumped right into working this morning on our final project. I, however, finished my morph specification sheet and finished my second knol on interest:

http://knol.google.com/k/g-m/the-mathematics-behind-interest-and/sxk1n4fcx8oa/5#

My first project is going to take the two money related things that we learned about the past two weeks (interest and the CPI) and combine them to form a calculator that illustrates how these things can influence your money supply and worth.

Final Project Manifesto

2009-06-15T08:44:00.000-07:00

Here is my overview for the final project:

Manifesto

This application is meant to combine two very similar ideas: Interest and the CPI. The most prevalent changes will involve changes to the interface to make the application more easy to use and understand. However, there will be noticeable changes to the rest of the program as well, such as an intro animation and more choices for what the user in terms of what exactly they want to do with their interest calculations or CPI data. It is meant to teach how much inflation/CPI can change prices of different items over time as well as how much money a person can lose when they take out loans.

Art

The largest change to the art aspect of the application will be an introduction animation before you get to the calculators for interest and CPI. I am thinking of having a kid trying to buy a lollipop for a nickel and have a little sign in the background with the month's CPI number. Then have the animation repeat with the number going up more and more and the kid having to use more and more nickels and eventually dollars until he runs out of money, then going straight to the CPI calculator. Another possibility for the Interest introduction animation would be a man buying expensive things and taking out more and more loans until a big stop hand pops up and turns into a wagging finger telling the man to stop and going to the interest calculator to help illustrate how this would be a bad idea. The purpose of this application is to show how loans and the CPI lose you money, and this animation is supposed to help illustrate this and show how this is the purpose right off the bat.

Applied Math

Interest could be good or bad. It is the money you earn from the bank, or money you lose from loans. More applied math concepts will be included in this application in the interest calculator. It will have methods to calculate amounts paid or earned on all of the interest equations we went over in class. This will include things such as simple interest, compound interest, payment plans, and loans. The user will be able to select any of these and see how much money they would have saved if they didn't take out a loan and paid it all up front, as well as how much that value can change with different time periods the loan is taken out for.

Programming

This code in this program will make everything outlined before work. Not much will change, except for integrating the code from the two applications together into one. The code will grab the input text from the user and perform the mathematical operations on it. Then, the code will display the output back to the user. It also lets the user select whatever calculator or calculation they wish to perform.

Friday June 12

2009-06-12T13:25:00.000-07:00

Day 10-

Today was a pretty relaxing day. The morning was spent messing around with sounds in flash and using music loops in our programs. We got all of our music and sounds for free from www.fashkit.com. Then we looked at some fractal applets online that would make different fractals and demonstrate the chaos game some more. We had lunch at The Sink and ate a whole ton of pizza. The unfortunate thing was that we had a fantastic game of Ultimate Frisbee right afterwards, so some of us that ate too much were hurting a bit when we were running around. We spent the afternoon brainstorming ideas for our final project and working on finishing any projects we started earlier this week.

We're heading out to Google next week which should be awesome.

Thursday June 11

2009-06-11T13:54:00.000-07:00

Day 9-

We finished today! Well, we finished with the class kind of work. All of our starter applications are done and we've finished with the formal programming, math lessons, and flash lessons. We worked on applications that made circuits and demonstrated networks, specifically, paths that cars travel to different cities. We also got a quick introduction to fractals during math since we finished with the normal planned lessons, which was really interesting.

Wednesday June 10

2009-06-10T13:43:00.000-07:00

Day 8-

Today we had an awesome lesson on rotoscoping. This involves at tracing individual frames of a movie and coloring them with paint tools. This creates realistic cartoon-looking motion clips. I took a video of a cat playing on the keyboard and used this technique to create a realistic cartoon version of this. It was also neat to try using the graphics tablets instead of the mice, which was a nice change.

During math we learned about slopes, the Pythagorean theorem, and basic trigonometry. After a tour of the ITLL, lunch, and a game of ultimate, we used these ideas to make a program that launched a car on a ramp across the screen at different angles and velocities.

Tuesday June 9

2009-06-09T13:42:00.000-07:00

Day 7-

In the morning we focused a lot on animation and techniques you can use to keep your timeline organized as well as adding buttons to switch between different frames in Flash.

In math, we learned about population growth and later applied that idea to our programs in flash. We doubled cupcakes and increased the population in the world.

We also got a tour of the dorms today before lunch. The rooms are SMALL! haha... but it was a nice view into college life.

Monday June 8

2009-06-08T14:27:00.000-07:00

Day 6-

We started out today with a tour around the ATLAS building. It went for a long time but it was interesting to see all the different things that you could do in this building if you decided to do their program in college. The rest of the day we learned more flash skills, and focused a lot on probability, which is what we built our applications on today; the Monty Hall problem.

A kind of slow Monday, but hopefully things will be a little more energetic tomorrow.

Friday June 5

2009-06-05T13:03:00.000-07:00

Day 5-

Today was a nice relaxing friday. We went over various Google applications such as Blogger and were introduced to Knol as well. We were assigned to write one by the end of the day, and I wrote one on using the bone tool in Flash.

http://knol.google.com/k/g-m/using-the-bone-tool-in-flash-cs4/sxk1n4fcx8oa/6#

We also saw a really neat flash animation in the form of a short movie. It had some fantastic artwork and was a great example of what flash animations could be.

We learned about dimensional analysis in math today, and also did a simulation on the spread of "swine flu" around the classroom. (We also got to eat M&Ms!!) The programming section of the day was basically catch up time to finish our Knols, past labs, write blog posts, or whatever.

I'll be back on Monday!

Thursday June 4

2009-06-04T13:34:00.000-07:00

Day 4-

We got to go to the planetarium today!! I was hoping that we would get to see a show, but it was still really cool to see different things about earth with the "science on a sphere." Also, using mathematica and the computer lab during the math section was a nice break compared to the classroom lectures that we have had so far.

Today was also the first really nice day that we've had, so we got to eat outside and didn't mind walking all around campus to the planetarium, engineering building, and back to the atlas building.

Wednesday June 3

2009-06-03T13:55:00.000-07:00

Day 3-

Today learning flash animation was interesting and we continued to learn new techniques and how to use more tools within flash. The math that we learned was various formulas for calculating interest, payment plans, and savings plans. The most exciting thing for me though was the programming section. I quickly worked ahead and started working on my own code for part three of the lab. (it didn't work, but hey, its a start!).

overall, a great day.

Tuesday June 2

2009-06-02T13:52:00.001-07:00

Day 2-

So today seemed like more of a slow day. It was probably the fact that the excitement of the first day wore off and it was raining... that wasn't fun... However, the topics that we learned about were still interesting. We got to learn animation in a more in depth way, and we covered two different topics in the math section (The CPI and different counting systems like binary and hexadecimal). Programming was great. We started to get more in depth with what we were learning, and built more of an interactive application. I was able to start on part 3 of the lab after a brief snag with my naming conventions.

As for lunch, the greek pita was pretty amazing delicious!

Monday June 1

2009-06-01T13:32:00.000-07:00

Day 1-

Well today was a pretty great start to the camp. Coming in and seeing bags of free stuff to keep is always nice :P. The theme of the day was this idea of Venn Diagrams, so the math session focused on them and the logic behind them along with the programming session, where we made a little flash program to do the logic behind Venn Diagrams for us. The most interesting thing for me was the Flash animation session because I hadn't ever done anything with flash before. Other upsides were the fantastic lunch and the chance to start out the day outside rather than inside.

Its been a great start and I hope that it stays this way for the next three weeks!!