Becoming Fluent with Technology By Kane Chong

1. Becoming Fluent with Technology By Kane Chong Making Information Available to the World with HTML and Web Pages Computational Thinking Dynamic Webpage Programming with Javascript We started our first web development experience by learning some simple XHTML. Through XHTML, we were able to format fonts in certain ways, upload pictures and display them, and create tables to organize the information we put. Computation Thinking is thinking at multiple levels of abstraction. In other words, we want to solve problems by thinking of them in an abstract way that can simulate a solution of some sort. An example would be running multiple programs in a computer. Is it actually running all the programs at the same time or is it running and switching between them really quickly? How can we communicate to someone all the way across the world using technology? How can I buy something without actually going to the store physically to purchase it? All these questions simulate computational thinking. How can I simulate playing Black Jack on the computer as if I was playing at a casino? What about simulating a shop online for shirts at UCSD? Through the power of JavaScript, I was able to do both this quarter. We learned everything from declaring variables to implementing logic with if else statements to creating functions! Desktop Publish with MS Word Through the power of Microsoft Word, we learned how to create useful documents with headers, table of contents, and a Works Cited page. We also learned how to put pictures and wrap text around them. Visual Programming with Alice Data Analysis and Visualization with MS Excel Presentation of Information with MS PowerPoint With the Alice Development software, we were able to create a world and manipulate objects within them. In our Frogs lab, we used functions and methods to output certain actions in our world. We optimized our code further by refactoring using parameters and created a simulation of frogs jumping in a pool before getting grabbed by a hawk. Using Microsoft Powerpoint, we learned how we could make certain charts and pictures more presentable and pleasing to the eye. By using Excel, we calculated stocks from the last few months and the profits/losses gained by our favorite companies. Mine was Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple. After the calculations, we generated charts for them and used MS Powerpoint to make them professionally presentable. With Excel, you can calculate and visualize data in a organized fashion. We learned to use functions that Excel already has such as sum, multiplication, division, and subtraction to calculate values across rows and columns. We also learned to output certain data to cells via if/else statements. In the end, we could select the cells and labels we wanted to graph them into different kinds of charts. Excel makes it extremely easy to analyze data but at the same time is very powerful.