Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Class Lecture 2/14/12

For today's lecture we basically had a review day. We had to speed read through the first five chapters in our book for 30 minutes. Then, each of us had to write down five questions we had pertaining to any of the chapters on a piece of paper, then type them up in the discussion board on blackboard for the professor to answer. Dr. Agrawal then answered students' questions individually by putting examples of each of their five questions on the board to help further our knowledge on any of the specific topics. We were able to take notes on anything helpful to us that he put on the board. We spent most of the class doing so. What were your questions? Did this help you? Do you feel like you might need a tutor? What are your thoughts about what we learned today?

During the last 30 minutes of class, we continued chapter 5 and talked about stream manipulators. We then made changes to an example program made by Dr.Agrawal by using characters instead of numbers. We also used the "toupper" and "tolower" functions, which are only used with characters. One last thing we touched on before leaving class was the set precision manipulator or "setw", which is used to display outputs in a different way and only works with the next output in your program. Examples of these programs are now avaliable in blackboard if you need to take a look at them.

To find them go to:
  • Disscussions
  • C++ example problems
  • Open "More Chapter-5 examples"
  • Then open the .zip folder under the same name.

Thursday, February 9, 2012

White House Science Fair: Marshmallow Cannon

Yesterday, February 8th, 2012, the White House held it's second annual science fair. This gave the opportunity for 100 student winners of science, technology, engineering, and math competitions from across 45 states to show off their science projects to the president. Bill Nye, the science guy and other well-respected educators and leaders from the science and engineering community were also able to witness this event. One of the stand out science projects was from a 14-year old kid named Joey Hudy, an 8th grader from Phoenix, AZ. His project was a compressed air-powered cannon that shoots out marshmallows 175 feet in the air. President Obama looked very impressed by this, and all the other projects at the fair. He announced several new initiatives regarding education and science that day as well. I thought this was a really interesting article, because it shows how creative these kids really were, and it's good to see the president hosting educational events like this that may benefit them in the future. So take it upon yourselves to read it and view the video along with it, I'm sure you'll enjoy it.

Here's a link to the article and a video:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57373664-1/obama-shoots-marshmallow-in-the-name-of-science/?tag=mncol