Articles in the 2010 Spring Exploring CS Category
2010 Spring Exploring CS »
1. List three things you learned from Nate’s presentation about Zillow and his career.
2. What was the most interesting thing Nate showed or mentioned?
3. List at least three ways in which Zillow.com is different from the websites we are building.
4. Nate showed a tool used to inspect the code of a web page. How is that useful for people who design and build websites?
5. If we could invite a guest speaker to come and talk about anything computing-related, what would you most like to hear about?
2010 Spring Exploring CS »
Here are the questions we used for review jeopardy.
Data representation
The amount of space a character takes in a text file. – What is 1 byte?
8 bits read together. – What is 1 byte?
Roughly one pickup truck’s worth of data if printed out on paper. – What is 1 gigabyte
A standard for representing the alphabet using binary. – What is ASCII?
100101 in decimal. – What is 37?
Pirates of Silicon Valley
The company that represented old-school computing and that Steve Jobs wanted to destroy. – What is IBM?
The price paid by Microsoft for …
2010 Spring Creative Computing 1, 2010 Spring Exploring CS »
Find inspiration in UW, CMU, Stanford research.
Artificial Intelligence
- intelligent transport systems
- swarm computing
- automatic image analysis (image search)
- automatic translation
- voice control
- natural language processing
- get ideas from MIT’s CSAIL
Human-Computer Interfaces
- brain-controlled computers
- gesture interfaces (skinput, sixth sense, Natal)
Ubiquitous Computing
- wearable computers
- “Smart grid” (sensors for electrical, power grids; HydroSense)
- RFID applications (“smart tags”, tracking)
Computing law
- laws regulating privacy
- anti-hacking laws
Large-scale computing
- quantum computing
- parallel computing (multi-core, multi-processor)
Computing Concepts
- Moore’s Law
- Agile Software Design
- Cloud Computing (Google docs, GMail, etc)
- Databases (information storage)
- Peer to peer networking (BitTorrent)
- Encryption
Human-based computation …
2010 Spring Exploring CS »
This reference was adapted from Dawn Pedersen’s original sheet — thanks!
External Style Sheets
External style sheets must be called from inside an XHTML page using a <link> element, which goes inside the <head> element. External style sheet file names must end in “.css”.
Example:
<head>
<title>An External Style Sheet</title>
<link type=”text/css” rel=”stylesheet” href=”style.css” />
</head>
External style sheets contain only CSS rules. They should never contain any XHTML tags such as <style>.
CSS Rules
All CSS rules are formatted like this:
selector {
property: value;
}
Example:
p {
color: #000000;
}
The example above specifies that all text inside …
2010 Spring Exploring CS »
We will be using Notepad++, which is linked from the desktop.
A basic web page has head and body elements inside of the html element:
Type out the basic HTML shown above. Notice that tags open and close containers. For example, the head starts directly after html starts, contains the title and closes right after that.
When you save this page, make sure it ends in .html (bieber.html, for example).
To see your page in the browser, click on Run in the menu at the top, then select ‘launch in Firefox.’
You should now see …
2010 Spring Exploring CS »
You will create a single HTML page giving information about your favorite musician, artist, politician, band or actor. If there’s another type of famous person you’re interested in covering, that’s probably ok. If you have no idea who to do this assignment about, then do it about The Beatles. Spend about 30 seconds choosing who it’s about!
The goal of this exercise is to practice basic HTML tags including:
html
head
title
body
h1, h2, h3
p
img
a
ul, ol, li
If you can’t remember what the tags do, read more about them at W3Schools.
Your page should have:
A title
At least …
2010 Spring Exploring CS »
As we have just learned, web pages are structured using HTML, styled using CSS and made dynamic using JavaScript. We’re going to spend some time getting familiar with these three technologies, starting with HTML.
Complete the following to get some familiarity with HTML:
Open Firefox (double click the link on your desktop)
Visit 3 websites you commonly go to and right click on the page then select ‘View Page Source.’ This will allow you to view the full source of the page. What are some things the pages have in common? Differences?
In the …
2010 Spring Exploring CS »
Everyone will be presenting their Scratch projects Friday May 28th. I expect all group members to participate. You will need to address the following questions:
Who is your team and why did you choose to work on the project you created?
What are the goals of your project? (what is the educational aspect?)
Who is your target audience?
What does your project do (show us a demonstration).
What is an interesting problem you had to solve to get your project running (show us the Scratch code)?
What was challenging in completing the project.
Your presentation …
2009 AP CS A, 2010 Spring Exploring CS, Programming Club »
We were lucky to have Ben Slivka join us in Exploring Computer Science and AP Computer Science. Mr. Slivka is a computer scientist who worked at Microsoft from 1985 to 1999 and was involved in several exciting projects there, including starting Internet Explorer. Since, he has worked at Amazon, started and recently sold Dreambox Learning, and has worked with several non-profits.
Mr. Slivka shared his ideas on the current state of computing technology as well as some of what is to come. I took some notes as students asked questions and …
2010 Spring Exploring CS »
Elevator Pitch (4 points)
__/2 – Good faith effort turned in
__/2 – Short yet comprehensive
Proposal (25 points)
__/5 – Good faith effort turned in
__/3 – Detailed and coherent
Reader can imagine the final product. Each scene and sprite is briefly described. The goals of the product are clear. Each section goes into detail and the sections don’t contradict each other.
__/3 – Executive Summary (1 or 2 paragraphs)
Catchy description of the need or problem the product will address and who the product is aimed to. Brief description of the product and the group.
__/2 – …
