Nara A. Valera's Blog

Week #22: Summer Session Block 2: Day 8, Workday

08/01/18

Hi! Today went by really fast than usual. I has the first interview meeting with Jennifer and I was so nervous! However, at the end of the interview Jennifer thought I delivered my answers great. After the interview, I sent an email to Jennifer and thanked her for her time meeting with me. I then worked on my some slides for my presentation for that afternoon. I had to compile my five most favorite projects during the Shodor Apprenticeship program.

Week #22: Summer Session Block 2: Day 7, Workday

07/31/18

Hello! Today, I worked hard on trying to finish my projects because tomorrow is my "last" day at Shodor as an apprentice. I worked on adding descriptions and observation to my oil spil modeling project. I also took several screnshots of my vensim model. Additionally, I redesigned my website!...

Week #22: Summer Session Block 2: Day 6, Workday

07/30/18

Good afternoon!Today, I had morning reception duty and I helped Levi by guiding the Shodor Summer Scholars to the workshop classroom. For the rest of my morning reception duty, I worked on putting the very final touches on my agent cubes model. I also started on my quality assurance document to make sure that there are no errors in my website including grammar, links, and pages. After lunch,I started working on filling in my Oil Spill HLD project website. I am typing in on how to use the agent cubes model in great detail because it is highly interactive. I also took screenshots of my agent cubes model at different time steps. I then used GIMP to scale the images in order to fit them in my website. I had to create div ids for my images in HTML and write coe in CSS in order for the pictures to show up on the Agent Model page. Additionally, I finished my Dice Statistics PHP project and I only need Ernie to take a look at it if everything is good. So hopefully, I can finish up everything before my last day at Shodor! :(

P.S I am nervous for my mock interview and presentation.

Week #21: Summer Session Block 2: Day 5, Workday

07/27/18

Hi!Today was another productive workday for me. I have completed my Dane Joe php assignment after several bugs. All of my code seemed right, but for some reason it would not output correctly. Even Ernie has some trouble in helping me figuring out the problem.I also worked on my Dice Statistics project and I think I am almost finished with it. Yay!

Week #21: Summer Session Block 2: Day 4, Workday

07/26/18

Hello Again! Today, I continued to work on Krista's projects. After several bugs in my php and failed attempts, I finally got my Random Hex Code Generator to work. Whenever I refresh the page of my Random Hex Code Generator, the background of the page turn different colors! It's like a mini party on my page. So now I am working on the Dane Joe project which is making me think a lot. I am trying to figure out how can I switch the first letter of the first and last name. I have tried the php string function substr(), but I do not think I am using it properly. Well, its back to the drawing board!

Week #21: Summer Session Block 2: Day 3, Workday

07/25/18

Good Afternoon! I worked on PHP form validation today and after some time I finished it. I had to follow a video demonstration from Ernie in order to complete it. After lunch, I began to work on Krista's projects. I started on the Random Hex Code Generator. Honestly, I was so confused on what to do, so I skipped around between Dice Statistics and Dane Joe.

Week #21: Summer Session Block 2: Day 2, Workday

07/24/18

Hi! Today was another workday where I was very productive. I surprisingly found myself understanding a lot of the concepts. I actually learned a lot from the programming syntax guide. I learned several of the PHP functions and even researched functions that were not required in the syntax guide.I am basically done with my syntax guide, so I finished the coinflip demo model. Tomorrow, I am going to go ahead and work on form validation.

Week #21: Summer Session Block 2: Day 1, Workday

07/23/18

I will be writing what I am working on for my Block 2 assignments.

Hello! Today was a productive workday! I am currently working on my PHP programming syntax guide. I am researching PHP's syntax mostly in W3 Schools which is really helpful. I am going to try to finish it up at home, so I can start on the PHP demos tomorrow. I was not at Shodor for the last week of Shodor because I was at a UNCG Camp. I am going to try my best to finish up my projects on time. I am sort of nervous that I will have to present next week because Block 3 is my last block. However, I get to show my work to my fellow classmates. I have seen some of the Block 2 projects and they look really cool, so I can not wait until I get there!

Week #20: Summer Session Block 1: Day 10, Workday

06/29/18

Hello Everyone! I was at afternoon reception today, so I could not do much work today.I worked more on my Agent Cubes Model to add it's finishing touches. I also started on my vensim model.

Week #20: Summer Session Block 1: Day 9, Workday

06/28/18

Hi everyone!I have been working so hard to create my AgentCubes models. I first started with creating the website for my models. I used my terrible template as a start for my website, however it took me longer then I intended to. I know how to link html/css files to each other, but for some reason my index.html would show css from my fall project. I did not understand why the link kept referencing a different css because my html looked fine. I also used the web validator to see if I had some errors, but there were no errors found. So, I was confused and to solve the problem I looked in my folder of the project in case I accidentally had another css file, but no. After several minutes, I looked into the head part of my html and decided to delete some code to see if it will work. Eventually, the css for my index.html worked!

Week #20: Summer Session Block 1: Day 8, Workday

06/27/18

Hello!Today was a great learning experience. In the morning, I started working on my AgentCubes model and I got some help from Ernie. I am glad that I am almost done with my Block 1 assignments because the Block 2 assignments look and sound cool. There is a lot of coding involved which I want to be apart of! However, I have to finish up my models and project website. I think it is coming along great. I have been working at home to finish up much faster.After lunch, Kristen came in to instruct us on how to create a professional resume. Kristen taught us the do's and don'ts of creating a resume. I enjoyed this lessons because it will most certainly help me land internships that I plan to apply to during my junior year of high school. I am going to have to remember all of the important activities I have done in the past, but it will be worth it! :D

Week #20: Summer Session Block 1: Day 7, Workday

06/26/18

Hi! Today was a very productive day! I finished all the GIMP projects and now I just need to do the High Level Design Project, website, and planning. I started watching Ernie's heater demonstration and followed along in AgentCubes. After lunch, I participated in the Engineering workshop creating straws towers that should hold cups and the weight of dropping marbles. I honestly enjoyed the hands on activity.

Week #20: Summer Session Block 1: Day 6, Workday

06/25/18

Hello! During the second week of Block 1 at Shodor, I was attending a Residential Summer Camp at NC State. So, I am finishing up my Block 1 assignments during Block 2. During the days I am working on my Block 1 assignments, I will document what I have worked on.

Today, I finally finished my logos which was a great relief!I finally designed my logos just the way I wanted them to be. Ernie and I talked about how will I finish my Block 1 work at Shodor.I have to continue doing Block 1 assignments until I am done during Block 2 and then do some Block 2 assignments, so I have a lot to catch up :/. On the bright side, I enjoy doing the assignments because I like designing! After lunch, I started on the cosmic turtles demo and it was a long video.However, I got through it and placed my own cosmic turtles collage on my website portfolio.

Week #19: Summer Session Block 1: Day 5, Workday and First ODAA Task!

06/22/18

Hi!Today is my last day for the first block at Shodor. Today was mostly a workday and I worked on my logos using Inkscape. I had to export my logos as png files and save them. After I did that, I opened up Gimp to rescale the png files in order to fit into my website. I kept working on my logos most of the first half of the day. After lunch, I had to take on the task of afternoon reception. I was nervous because I kept asking myself "what if I messed up?" Before taking on the role, I asked Caroline C if she could train me on how to do reception duty. She was a great help for me and sort of took my nerves away. After I adjusted myself at reception, Aaron started to train me on how to answer the phone and we even made practice phone calls.

Week #19: Summer Session Block 1: Day 4, Favicons, Logos, and more!

06/21/18

Hello.I was not feeling my best today. I had a headache(probably from the computer screen) and could not focus on my work.I tried my best working hard on our new assigned projects. On a lighter note, I finally finished my responsive web design tutorial! Then I started to create my favicon on Inkscape. I had a hard time thinking on what I should create for my favicon. Eventually, I was playing around with some shapes and came up with a cute panda. However, the next part had me puzzled. Apprentices had to research and figure out how to actually place the favicon on the tabs. I researched and research, but I still could not find the instructions on how to place the favicon. I tried out several codes, but nothing worked for me. I was about to give up, however, I decided to watch this youtube video was my logo. Again, I could not think of what to create for my logo with my name. I was then spacing out and thinking about beach since it was summer. So, I decided I could create beach items with my name. I created my "a's" as starfish and seashells. My "e" from my lastname "Valera" was converted into a sea turtle.

Week #19: Summer Session Block 1: Day 3, Introduction to Inkscape.

06/20/18

Hey!Today was a productive day at SHODOR. In the first half of my day at SHODOR, I was working on the Responsive Web Design Tutorial. I worked on it back at home to try to get more ahead since I won't be coming in next week. I was almost finishing up the video, but then I noticed when I looked at the webpage part of the website's text was not centered. I looked back to my css file for anything, but nothing. I checked the index.html file, but I still could not find the source of the bug in the website. Finally, I checked back to my html file and noticed that I misspelled section and wrote "secion.""Way to go Nara." Anyways, after lunch, Ernie demonstrated how to use Inkscape. I thought it was interesting since I have been interested in graphic design. It was cool to manipulate shapes and objects and change their color. I created a baby duck using the several tools on Inkscape. QUACK.Then we had a challenge to accomplish. We had to use what we have created during Ernie's demonstration and create an interesting images. So, I made a galaxy with ducks.

Week #19: Summer Session Block 1: Day 2, Introduction to Graphics Scaling, Responsive Web Design, and Portfolio Website HLD.

06/19/18

Hi! Today was the second day of Summer Block 1. In the morning, Ernie introduced us to our new project assignments. I was sort of excited because it involved with web design and graphics. I got right to work with scaling images using Gimp and the tutorial was pretty easy. However, I tried to create a webpage to display the images I worked on and the images did not want to appear! First, I went to check if my website validated, and there were no errors. I was stumped. I then turned to Google and saw that in front of the image name I had to put the folder it was in. So, I applied what I learned into all of my images and then refreshed my page, but no luck.:(. I then took a break for lunch. When I came back to my desktop, I asked Ernie for help and it turnet out that for some reason cyberduck was not saving my work even though it looked like it did. Ernie recommended me to open my files with TextWrangler, so that my work appears on my website. I tried what he said and it worked! I was glad because it was something that I could check off of my list of assigned projects.

: )

Week #19: Summer Session Block 1: Day 1, Orientation Day.

06/18/18

Hello! Today is the first day of Summer Block 1. Today, Ernie gave us a run down of what is expected of us as Apprentices like being respectful at all times and helping others. Ernie also focused on how we should always pay attention to the details of every project he assigns us. We were assigned our first project today which is we have to come up with a High Level Design story and create a agent model and a system model. I did not really know what to create a model about, so I was mostly brainstorming and researching on possible topics. I had Stranger Things and the Russia World Cup on a list of possible ideas that interested me. However, I stumbled upon oils spills because I was searching for natural disasters. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico caught my eye to base the project on because I was alive when it happened. I can recall for several weeks the news broadcasted the spread of the oil spill and how it was affecting marine life. I also remember the several commercials on television from Dawn that they were helping birds caught in oil. I researched more on the subject of oil spils and how several factors go into it's spreading like wind, tides, and currents. Additionally, I researched how oil spills are contained to prevent further damage to coastlines. I sort of have my basic story, but I don't really know my extension to the story to make it "High Level Design." I have been thinking either to have boats that spread chemicals into the water to get rid of the oil or using different types of booms that absorb oil and deflect it into other directions.

Week #18: Spring Session, Topic: Parallel Computers Day 3. (Last day of Spring Module)

04/21/18

Hi. Today was the last day of the Spring Session and Ernie came to visit us. Aaron continued the lesson of parallel computing. I finished my parallel computing workbook today. What was exciting today was that the apprentices and I did a hands on parallel computing experiment. It was really cool because we used a virtual desktop that ran bccd and Linux I believe.

Week #17: Spring Session, Topic: Parallel Computers and High Performance Computing .

04/14/18

Hello, today was a pretty interesting day. Through several activities, I gained a better understanding of parallel computers. We did a lot of research about high performing computers. It think it is so cool to see very large computers that run several applications. High perfromance computers can help run programs, simulations, and data that is useful to make the world a better place. Currently, the best HPC is located in China and the United States' HPC is in 5th place. So the US needs to step up their game. We also watched an educational funny video about HPCs and it made me laugh because it used the penguins from Madagascar.

Week #16: Spring Session, Topic: Day of Presentations .

04/07/18

Today Claire and I presented our project and it turned out better than I expected. I feel that I progressed in presentation, but I still have some things to work on. Today what we learned after the presentations was about a PARALLEL COMPUTER. I learned that there are like processors that work together to do a job and it can be sometimes a good or bad thing.

Week #15: Spring Session, Topic: Group Project continued .

03/17/18

Hi. Today was another workday to continue working our group projects. Claire and I worked on our JavaScript code for our project and we had some trouble. Claire asked Ernie for help on our project and he helped us out a lot. I was having some difficulty on my own and Claire helped me.

Week #14: Spring Session, Topic: Group Project.

03/10/18

Hello. Today was a workday for our projects. Claire and I were planning a lot and getting approval from Aaron.

Week #13: Spring Session, Topic: Introduction to Group Project.

03/03/18

Hello. I was not here on March the 3rd because I had to attend Discovery Day. On this day the class was introduced to another group project. My assigned partner was Claire! We emailed each other during the week to figure out some ideas for our project.

Week #12: Spring Session, Topic: Libraries, Functions, and Objects.

02/17/18

Hi. Today we learned mainly three things; libraries, functions and objects. First of all we did a refactoring problem. Refactoring is to write code without changing its behavior to make it easy for the programmer. We attempted to simplify some lines of code and I had some trouble at first, but Caroline helped me. Then we moved on to functions that are a set of instructions to the computer and it is given a name. It can also be called a subprogram.

Week #11: Spring Session, Topic: Programming Concepts Part 2

02/10/18

Good Afternoon! Today apprentices continued learning about programming concepts. I learned many things behind the actual syntax of javascript. Last summer, I took a coding class wich was really cool, but I really did not understand behind the concepts of the syntax. Today, Aaron clarified mostly everything had questions about like arrays, loops, if, and more. Aaron also taught us the that programmers follow the DRY Principle which mean Don't Repeat Yourself. Today we also touched up on booleans, or, not, and if.

Week #10: Spring Session, Topic: Programming Concepts

02/03/18

Hello! Today is the first day of the Spring Session at Shodor. We were introduced to the broad range of programming and the ideas behing the syntax. Shodor's approach of teaching programming is working example, so that we, apprentices, can learn from dissecting the code. We used "bouncing particles" to learn the concepts behind the code of Javascript. There is a three step process in changing or creating code: change/edit, save, and run. We first have to save everything when we create changes in code because if not then it will not show up of we run it. In order to tell the computer what we want it to do we have to create instructions in their computer language so the computer may interpret it. If we want to leave descriptions about the code for others who read the code we write comments with this symbol(/).

Week #9

12/16/17

On this day Jessie and I presented our group projects. It was so nerve-racking. Jessie and I had to do some last minute adjustments because we discovered there was a mistake in thhe Vensim model, but groups were laready project. Jessie was great presenting the project;however, I panicked at the last minute and I forgot what I had planned to say.

Week #8

12/09/2017

Hello! Today was a chilly and snowy day. The day before it starte snowing so Shodor opened late at 10 am to be careful of the snow. Luckily, it was snowing in my area and I was able to get into Shodor on roup ! This Saturday was mostly a workday with our partners to work on our projects. Jessie an I got a lot of work done during that day. We had already created a base iagram for our Vensim model and we aske Aaron for help to make adjustments. We then got approval an we quickly started working on the Vensim model, but we had some difficulties because the graph was looking strange. Aaron manage to help us an we worked it out. I started working on the project website an Jessie was working on the Agentcubes model since she knew more in that department. I started putting our work in the website and it is looking good.

Week #7

12/02/2017

Hello Everyone! I was not able to come to class this saturday because I had to go take the "big scary" test, the SAT. Before hand, I met up with Ms. Jennifer for our November meeting and she helped me talk to Aaron about the group project where the apprentices were going to recieve project information and partners. My partner was Jessie and she is really nice and sweet. I emailed her about the project, so we could go to work and she suggeted the idea of the symbiotic relationship of the bees and flowers. I believed that it was a great idea and we decided to have a Google hangout call. On the day of our meeting, we had some technical difficulties using Google hangouts and so we called eah other on the phone to discuss our plan. We then emailed Aaron and he said he liked the idea, but we had to show our diagram. At the time we did not have all the details for our diagram, but we had written the factors of what could cause a decline on the bee population and flower population. We are working on our diagram so we can present it to Aaron. I can not wait for the next class!:)

Week #6

11/18/2017

Hey! Today went more into depth in modeling in Vensim and we were introduced to Agent Cubes. Agent Cubes is a visual representation of modeling and we created a model of healthy and sick people. The healthy people were pink and the sick people were blue. It was so cool to see when the sick people touched the healthy people the healthy got sick.

Week #5

11/11/2017

Hello! Today was a fun day. Dr Panoff showed about modeling in Vensim which is a cool way to visually show a model. We used a scenario of an increase in poulation of bunnies and the death of bunnies. At first I had a hard time figuring it out, but then Dr. Panoff helped me. At the end of the day I got the hang of it and I was proud of myself. Dr. Pannof said that college students study this for semesters, but we did it in one day.

Week #4

11/04/2017

Hey! I could not come to class on November 4, but I watched the recording of the class and managed to catch up on what I missed.I was introduced to creating randomized numbers in Excel and creating if statments. I followed along on how to apply it the world like a scientist with dominant and recessive genes with the randomizer.

Week #3

10/21/2017

Hello! In the morning we learned about computational thinking and finished up on Who we are. We also listned to a Dr.Panoff lecture and he even did some card tricks during lunch break that was based on math.

Week #2

10/14/2017

Hey guys! It is Nara and today I learned some very new things that I never thought about before. In the morning we were introduced to the principles of office/workplace ethics. It taught us about how one should dress, act, and speak in a work setting. It was very funny and fun with the whole class.

Week #1

10/07/2017

Hello! Today we were introduced to the many aspects of Shodor like how it got started, tour of the place, and the staff. Currently,we are making the blog using html on the Shodor server.