Learning Journal

Relational tables and spreadsheets look similar with both having rows and columns. What are some important differences between the two? A relational table cannot have duplicate rows and must have unique identifying names, whereas a spreadsheet does not have these rules, as they can be distinguished by their absolute position on the sheet. What are … Read more

Hindsight is 20/20 Going into this class, I would have a few recommendations for the next cohort. First, study up on your Java! Not having to learn the language from scratch makes this class very digestible. Second, plan a good collaborative workflow for your team. My team used GitHub and Slack, and the process of … Read more

Have you ever created an app before, either for Android or iPhone? How did it go? I have experimented with app development using Flutter recently. The experience was pleasant and certainly more straightforward than using traditional Android programming, but I didn’t do much with it. Now that I have some experience creating an app, I … Read more

What experience do you have with UML diagrams? I first learned UML diagrams in my second semester Intro to Computer Science course in community college. Outside of this course, I have only made a few on them. Are they used at your workplace? I have not worked in an IT space, so I have not … Read more

GUI is learned late in the game with Java. Do you think this is helpful or harmful and why? I think learning a GUI is important, but it is helpful to wait until later to teach it. Speaking from experience, to a novice programmer, a GUI can seem like a monumental task. I recall looking … Read more

Polymorphism An example of polymorphism that I often see is the “Shapes” class. I used this example in an introductory Java course previously. A class Shapes is defined as: This creates a class with all the common factors of a geometrical shapes. Then, in child classes Box and Sphere, all of the methods and data … Read more

This week, we looked at multi-dimensional arrays. I have used these types of arrays in both C++ and Java previously. The largest I have used are two-dimensional arrays. I think anything larger than that is unreasonable, and I cannot think of an instance in which I would want to use one. Many other data structures … Read more

Most languages I have used feature OOP elements. In fact, I don’t think I have used any languages that don’t feature OOP outside of Linux shell scripting, which I do not have much experience with. I have not used OOP outside of school extensively but I have on occasion. I have used it recently when … Read more

Q/A Have you used Eclipse before? I have used Eclipse in the past. At my community college, I took 2 courses in Java which were taught with Eclipse in mind. In these courses, I used Eclipse to manage Java SDKs and set up version control. While I prefer using Visual Studio Code as my text … Read more

Review of Other Teams’ Projects Orion Analytics‘ short video was done very proficiently. They gave a clear and thorough presentation. They gave adequate research to the presentation. The quality of their video was high and was interesting. The level of jargon used was appropriate for the target audience of general viewers. However, most of the … Read more