My progress check – JAVA – October 12th 2008

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The main principle I gathered from my Physics class is a piece from a theory called Radical Constructivism. It’s a theory of understanding in Science that I’m applying to some of my programming and compsci studies.

The common convention taught in most science (and even non science) classes involves memorizing the someone else’s understanding and being able to regurgitate that on a test.  (Do you really know what it means or are you just taking someones word on it?)  The point of that class was to break down very simple ideas and develop your own understanding of the principle.  When you have this very detailed understanding you can apply your understanding of these principles in any given situation and get the correct answer.

We spent an entire semester looking at motion and force which was represented in simple graphs.  We had to make sense of very finite details in these graphs and translate this into our own definitions.  The tests established our understanding by giving us scenarios or situations we never encountered in Lab or class and you had to apply your understanding of these principles.  If you didn’t have a complete understanding of them it became obvious.  There was not a right answer to memorize.  The right answer came from your experience and how you frame an understanding from lines on a graph and translate them to what they really mean to you.  It was a very interesting approach.  It’s the idea that we learn more from experience than from memorization.  I felt like someones guinea pig but it was an experience that will stay with me.

I won’t always have the luxury of time to get this engrossed in a topic, but where I can…I will.

JAVA is going to be my first programming language and in it, is the basics of  “OOP” or Object Oriented Programming.  While learning it, I’m taking these ideas and applying them in different programming scenarios and watching the outcome in my JAVA projects.  There are a slew of additional exercises and projects that were skipped over in my class that I am completing and sorting through.  In addition I write out my own “problem/exercise” and develop a program for it.  Then I’ll run a number of various inputs through to see if there are any potential logic errors. (Testing as it’s called).  It’s a similar approach to what we did in my physics class and I’m tracking my progress here.  I set up a blog category for this and it will mean little to anyone but me on where I’m at with this.

Done:

• Computer Basics – hardware, & memory.
• Netbeanz IDE Basic operations – writing, compiling, testing and debugging simple programs
• software reuse
• OOP basics
• JAVA Basics
• size and position of graphics figures
• drawing ovals, circles and polygons
• specifying colors
• running a Java applet
• JAVA naming conventions for variables, constants, and strings
• JAVA documentation mechanics, comments, indentation
• Identifiers
• import statements
• Assignment statements
• simple input (keyboard- java.util.scanner classs)
• simple screen output
• Type casting
• Arithmetic operators
• String constants & variables
• Concatenation of strings
• simple binary math
• basic if-else statement
• Boolean expressions
• java e-notation

TO DO/ WORKING ON NEXT:

• drawing arcs
• Parentheses & precedence rules
• Specialized assignment operators
• increment & decrement operators
• string methods
• string processing
• escape characters
• The Unicode Character set
• input delimiters
• JOptionPane class
• comparing strings
• Nested if-else statements
• Multibranch if-else statements
• the conditional operator
• the exit method
• switch statements
• enumerations
• java loop statements
• programming with loops
• tracing variables
• assertion checks
• the drawstring method

(much more will be added to the TO DO / WORKING ON List as time goes.)

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