First AP CS mock exam

This week was harsh for a few of us. Unfortunately I started off feeling that I would blow on the second half of the AP CS exam, but apparently the 2nd half of the APCS exam always tends to be harder than the first half. I have done poorly on the first practise exam, but I am being very optimistic. I blew this one, but I am not getting my hopes down. When we had the review sessions for the exam, it was really helpful for me because I worked on al the questions with Gershon, and I really got them. I understood them and they really are not that hard, if you pay attention and work hard and focus. I know that I am capable and of getting a 4 on the AP. I am not saying that its easy to get a 4 on it, but I can push my self to doing it and I have promised myself that I will get a 4 on the AP. I  have already scheduled for myself to look at Barron's review this weekend, do a lot of JavaBat over the weekend, seeing that my free response is very poor, but things will change. I will make the change, and I will flip things around. I have already started going javabat, I want to be my maximum potential till I reach the AP exam, so I want the next month to be completely focus and I want to focus and do well on the next practise exams for APCS. My objective is to do well, not only that but get the right sense of time and be able to double check my answers.  I need to power through and promise to bring all my focus back into class. I will make the change. Wish me Best of Luck!

Practise Test+ Weekend

So.. I see there is a countdown up for the actual AP CS exam. Meanwhile, this week we had our first official half-AP CS exam. Needless to say, I did terrible on the exam. It was one of my off-days and a terribly off-week. But I am going to be back up because this weekend was very much required and I got to recharge and focus my energy. I went over the mistakes on the multiple choices on my paper with Gershon, and believe it or not, I could have easily scored a 14+ on it because the questions were fairly very simple, I just could not focus at all on that day because of my other AP mock exams. I will let it go; it was just one bad day. Over the weekend, for my own sake, I went up into JavaBat and worked my way through 2 Recursion-2 exercises and 2 String-3 exercises. I also went over String-1 and string-2 and some array-2 problems just to revise and practice for myself. I feel prepared and confident taking the next AP exam. Here I GO!

Barrons

We were supposed to do 21 multiple choice questions from the Barrons book review. It was basically much more review but it did explain a new concept call the Waterfall Model which is completely new. But I go 15 multiple choice questions right so for so good. Apart from that, I did 2 recursion-2 problems, and I was able to solve 1 Array-3 problem. But I had quiet a hard time doing String-3 problem which still remains unsolved.
I was also supposed to work on my Grid World project but till this point, has been quiet unsuccessful. It is quiet a challenge writing the coding for the actors and the objects because even though I am much more comfortable writing coding now, its so hard to understand what the packets require us to do. I was able to implement the Fibonacci bug half way, but I got so confused what to do next. I tried to seek external help which was not very useful and I tried to understand it on line, and study the mathematical algorithm to construct a Fibonacci board but it was very unsuccessful. Mr.Daly I will be need one more class time period hopefully to fully finish and pack up on my project because it is quiet a challenge working individually. I still need to construct a Fibonacci board which produces random numbers.

GridWorld Fibonacci Project

So for my GridWorld private project, we are supposed to choose one project. I am going to be coding Fibonacci project for the next couple of weeks. Till this point, frankly, I have been able to go over thoroughly read all the coding, and the reading material in the packet. So from the look of it, I am supposed to code a gridworld which prints Fibonacci numbers on the blocks and it will hold a Fibonacci bug. I see that we have Actor which is the super class, and then it has subclasses of Bug and Rock. I myself have a very vague idea of what Fibonacci numbers are and how they work. There is a Fibonacci sequence that I need to be aware about. Till now I have just reviewed the packet and I will start working. But I have some general questions that I will ask Mr.Daly tomorrow in class. I have started coding the Fibonacci rock. I have added the instance filed and initialized it in the constructor given the parameters. I set their colour to black as default but I got stuck on setting white as the background because we have to pull some Super method. I will ask about this tomorrow in class. 

Barron's REVIEW

So for this weekend we were supposed to do 22 multiple choice questions. I got a 18 on it. Not in the best shape. I feel happy that I did well because at this point, it is basically all review material and there is nothing really new, so it’s all review for us. I think I would really like to go over inheritance and functioning of super and sub classes and how methods are implemented without involving and duplication. There were 2 questions involving recursion that I felt were a little bit confusing, so I decided to get on JavaBat and work on some recursion-1 problems. I did about 5, because I got very distracted by Array-3. They were particularly very challenging and it took me a good 2 hours with some brakes to code them. I only got one right, maxMirror but I attempted coding seriesUp and maxSpan, but I only got halfway through. I got tired of it so I let it rest and I moved to doing some String-3 which were also pretty challenging. It took me a lot of time to understand gHappy but by the end of like good 40 minutes spent on it, I got through it, got it correct and it was not as hard problem as I perceived it to be. I think Javabat and just Gridworld will really boost my confidence to write coding on the free response which I need to work on. But it is defiantly getting better, compared to myself 3 weeks ago. 

GridWorld exercise multiple choice

We had to do 34 questions for the weekend. I missed it last week, so I had to make it up from last week. I answered 27 of these questions right. I personally think I do much better on multiple choices, more of my strong sides I think. I looked at my mistakes and I understood my mistakes.  I feel that I will really be able to boost my grade up if I do well on the GridWorld section.  I still have some problem understanding the implementation of methods from the super class in the subclasses and how inheritance works here because I find it hard to work with coding when there is inheritance involved.  

grid world page 35

1	Why doesn’t CrabCritter override theprocessActors() method?	They both use the same code, no need to duplicate.
2	Describe the process a CrabCritter uses to find and eat other actors. Does it always eat all neighboring actors? Explain.	It collects positions of actors left, right or ahead of it, and then implements the eat method. Unless it’s a rock/critter.
3	Why is the getLocationsInDirections()method used in CrabCritter?	getActors() gets all available positions to move into
4	If a CrabCritter has location (3, 4) and faces south, what are the possible locations for actors that are returned by a call to the getActors() method?	4,3 4,4 4,5
5	What are the similarities and differences between the movements of a CrabCritter and a Critter?	Left or right? Not sure
6	How does a CrabCritter determine when it turns instead of moving?	It turns when it cannot move anywhere
7	Why don’t the CrabCritter objects eat each other?	Critters eat other objects in the field. That is the basis no?