Hello friends, welcome to my blog post. This is my sixth blog post regarding my in-depth project. I will be updating you on my progress, and I will also be talking about the DeBono concepts from the book, how to have a beautiful mind. I hope you enjoy! 🙂
Progress Report
I have been working extremely hard over the past few weeks, and I believe that I have improved a lot! Most of what I have done, is continuing to work on my coding tutorial program, which if you are interested in, you can check it out for yourself right here. There is not much I can do other than tutorials, since this whole project is my first ever time doing any sort of programming. Its kind of like a complete cold start. However, I have started learning how to write my tutorial codes, into a program called Intellij IDEA. The code won’t be written any differently, but there are certain shortcuts you can take instead of writing something all the way through. For example, the command System.out.println() , can be written with the shortcut sout, which makes it easier to work with.
My mentor mentioned to me that when she was learning to program, she made the same mistake that she thinks a lot of people make. She said you can’t rush into it all at once. Especially for someone like me, who has absolutely zero experience coding and went into this with no knowledge at all. She recommends taking baby steps, even if it takes longer, because it will give you a better result at the end. An example of how I have been following this advice is my HelloWorld mod that I am working on for Minecraft. I started with the example mod that I have learned how to download previously, and then I used my current knowledge, with the help from my dad, to add in some messages to the mod. That way, when we add it into Minecraft, we can test if my knowledge is correct. Here is how that went.
You can think of it like climbing a mountain. You may want to go to the bottom of the mountain, and just climb up right away. The problem with this is, you aren’t prepared. You don’t have the proper training to climb a mountain. That is why you have to train, and you have to take it step by step. Then, once you are really confident with your material, you can go full-on and climb the mountain. That’s how I like to think about what I’m doing with this coding. Baby steps.
Mentor Update
I only have a short little update, and it is that I have had to change mentors because of a change in plans. She is about 8 months pregnant, and she is ill at the moment. Because of that, there is no way that I would ask her to assist me with my project. Since she now isn’t able to help, my father has filled in as my mentor. It is not a big change, since my father is my previous mentor’s employer, and they work together. That means they have the same skill sets, and they also have around the same length of experience.
How to Have a Beautiful Mind
In this chapter we talked about concepts, and why they are important. One of the quotes from the book that I think is very important, is
“You always eat ‘food’. But do you ever eat ‘food’ as such? You do not. You eat steak, you eat chicken, you eat strawberries. You always eat some specific type of food and not ‘food’ in general. Food is a concept. A hamburger is the practical idea.”
I talked with my dad about this quote, and we both can see clearly how it can relate to the subject we are learning about. In programming, there are concepts, and there are ideas. A concept in coding would be known as a class. In that class, there are different commands that you can do, and each class is different.
What exactly did I learn?
I focused recently on a few specific subjects in my tutorial.
System.out.println() – a statement that prints that prints the argument that is passed to it.
int – a variable that is used to hold a value of any whole number, up to a certain
amount. It stands for integer.
double – a variable that is used to store very large or very small numbers. It can
also hold decimals.
boolean – this is a variable that holds a value of true or false.
When any of these variables are used in a program, you need to give them a value, then you can print them to the console. For example, here is something that I did as a practice in my tutorial.
public class GreaterThanEqualTo {
public static void main(String[] args){
double recommendedWaterIntake = 8;
double daysInChallenge = 30;
double yourWaterIntake = 235.5;
double totalRecommendedAmount = recommendedWaterIntake * daysInChallenge;
boolean isChallengeComplete = yourWaterIntake >= totalRecommendedAmount;
System.out.println(isChallengeComplete);
}
}
In this particular example, math is also used, but it doesn’t always need to be used.
When I learned the math commands, I knew most of them already, but others I had never seen before, because they are used exclusively in java.
*- multiplication
/- division
+- addition
– – subtraction
>= – greater than or equal to
<= – less than or equal to
The last thing I really had to remember this lesson, is getting into the habit of putting a semicolon at the end of a line. Sometimes a program will run without a semicolon, but it is the most effective thing to get into the habit of leaving one in, because majority of the time, if you are in Java, your code won’t run smoothly if you don’t.
Thank you for taking the time to read my blog post! Stay safe! 🙂