August 17th Today I worked more on making sure that my Apprentice Portal project was free of bugs, and fixed a bug with my AgentSheets model in that project. I also simplified my page by taking things common to all three of my pages and putting them in text files so I only have to edit those files in one place. This makes adding new pages much faster and more simple.
August 16th Ernie was unfortunately sick on this day, but he did send email to us containing feedback of our Apprentice Portal page. I spent the morning making the changes that Ernie suggested. Afterwards I worked more on my personal website, adding a dropdown menu to the tab bar, so that one can jump to a particular block's blog entries with one click instead of two which it was before.
August 15th I learned more about CSS transitions today, creating this website. It uses CSS transitions to fade the colors in and out, and it uses PHP to generate the random hex colors that are applied. I realized that I could use this for my own website: if you move your mouse onto the tab bar, you should see the color change with a more gradual transition rather than instantaneously. Later in the day I worked on a website for and organization with which Shodor partners.
August 14th In the morning, I fixed the tab bar issue I started working on yesterday; infact, I was able to do it very quickly, as the solution was one that I had not considered the day before at all. After fixing this issue, I worked on piece capturing for my Stratego game. After doing this, I learned a little about CSS animations, as seen if you mouse over here. This does not support older browers or Internet Explorer. You can check which browsers support CSS transitions here.
August 13th I worked more on my Stratego game on this day. I made the movement and display of pieces work properly: the first player can only see the values of their own pieces. At this point the game is not playable, but the two players can move around. Now, if a piece moves onto another, the piece is always captured by the moving piece. Tomorrow I hope to have capturing working the way it does in the actual game. Afterwards, I will add the ability to set up the game, and for the game to detect when players have one. Towards the end of the day, I worked on making my website use PHP instead of Javascript and fixing several issues with the design of the page. One annoying issue involved the tab bar across the top of the page. I could not get the three to take up the space evenly, as the website uses percentages to be viewable on different sized resolutions.(Try scaling down your browser window.)
August 10th Today I worked on converting my Tic-Tac-Toe game into another, more complicated game called Stratego. This is a simple game where the two players have forty peices, valued from one to ten. A pice with higher value defeats a lower piece. The difficult thing about making this game is that the players see different things: The players can only see the values of their own peices but not the other players'. This caused me several problems in creating this game, but by the end of the day I was able to resolve most of them.
August 9th This Thrusday I was documenting the SSP workshop. I wrote down what happened in the class and I took pictures, but I was also able to help many of the workshop students as they worked on their modeling projects that they will be presenting tommorow. I was able to answer a few of the student's questions.
August 8th Today I continued working on my Tic-Tac-Toe game. In order for this game to be able to work the way I wanted to, I had to learn how to use AJAX to communicate with the server to see if a file had been changed. Learning this took much of my time, but at the end of the day the game was in a playable state, but I will continue to work on it in the future. I hope to give the game the abilty to detect when a player has one the game so the field can be reset.
August 7th This morning I tested some of the interactivate activites on the iPad and iPod as they are being moved to Javascript to be able to run on mobile devices. I tested two graphing applications. After I finished testing these, I worked on making a two-player online Tic-Tac-Toe game. My intent in making this game is to use it as a basis for making more complicated 2-player online games.
August 6th Today I finished styling the CSS for my Apprentice portal and went through and checked that each thing on the portal worked. Afterwards I made a MS paint-like javascript application and helped with Keith's PHP chat client.