Summary of This Week’s Goals

This week, we were tasked to make an app with AppLab on Code.org (Javascript), review and understand the expectations of CollegeBoard Create Performance Tasks, and reflect understanding of how we can do well on the AP Exam based on the article “How I Got a 5!” by Bria.

This Week’s Progress

Instead of going case by case this week (since there are only two BIG “cases”), let’s go by each learning target of the week and show how the learning goals have been met.

AppLab Program with Javascript

I created a Pokémon quiz with AppLab. There are 15 questions in order of the associated Pokémon generation covered in the question. For each question, the quiz-taker inputs his or her answer by clicking an image or a box with text in it (depending on the question). If the user clicks the correct answer, a “That’s right!” screen is displayed and the correct answer (cor) value is increased by 1; if the user clicks an incorrect answer, a “Not quite!” screen is displayed and the cor value goes unaltered. At the end, based on the cor value, elements are shown corresponding to the cor value and its reflection of your score. Flavor text is provided based on your score beneath the direct display of your results.

This program made use of onEvent, if statements, and showElement. It is relatively simple and compact, and serves its purpose of reflecting the user’s knowledge of Pokémon efficiently.

CollegeBoard Create Review Task Expectations

In my AppLab Quiz Jupyter Notebooks post (click here), I review how my quiz fits the six rows of the CollegeBoard Create Task expectations rubric. Rather than going over it all here, just check the link.

How I Got a 5!

To show understanding of what was covered in the article and in order to fit a Hack mentioned at the end of the page, I created a five-question multiple choice quiz about it.

Rather that copying the format of either of my previous quizzes, this quiz was made completely from scratch by me. Since we didn’t have quite as much time this week to have a bunch of topics to learn about, I decided I might as well look back on previous topics from last week that I didn’t quite understand. Mainly, this was loops. So, unlike my previous two quizzes, this one is done almost entirely with a single loop.

Independent Coding

I’ll use this section to cover extra coding I did for fun or to gain better understanding of the things we’ve studied so far. All of what was done this week was working toward the creation of an ambitious text-based RPG made entirely with Python.

In pursuit of a smooth music loop system (allowing for an intro segment before the loop) in the background of other functions, I have figured out how to do just about everything aside from make a smooth loop. I’ve worked with timers, the time.sleep command, pygame and mixer and subprocess to try to find a solid solution and only pygame seems to offer a potential strong solution.

I’ve also found a way to print colored text and italics text with Python. I’ve combined this with a couple functions I’ve made to do a common video game style text scrolling print (where text is printed character by character, but quickly). By defining these text colors and scroll speeds as variables, I’ll be able to make a settings menu within which you’ll be able to alter these variables based on personal preferences. How fun.

Not gonna link to this code, though…no spoilers!

Summary

Overall, this is one of my shorter review tickets. I expressed my understanding of these various topics in a few large projects rather than a bunch of little 10-minute posts or programs. I feel that I understand everything covered this week pretty well.