Holiday Project

After finishing outcome 3, which was a project management and website creation based outcome I have become inspired to become serious about coding and to try a bit harder than I have been. And now that it is the holidays I feel that now is a perfect time to perfect my coding and website development abilities.

I was also inspired by the show Silicon Valley to create a chart to manage my team better, which  I did and it was a master piece. The picture above is from the show and also after this project, if I am going to go into i.t. I am going to be Jared as I created the chart and thought it was awesome just like he did. Also I want to say how much I loved this show would definitely recommend.

 

 

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Learning HTML

I finished my first course on Codecademy of HTML and CSS. I really enjoyed the course and doing the coding. So I thought of investigating the other HTML courses there are out there. I remembered Lynda from earlier in the year, so I checked out their courses on HTML.

I have analysed the efficiency and effectiveness of both courses

Codecamedy:

efficiency: It didn’t cost anything, it didn’t take much time and I could do it in my own time, and I felt that it was an enjoyable task and I felt it was more of a fun activity than a chore.

effectiveness: well I learnt HTML and CSS so it did its job, it was suitable because it taught me and allowed me to put the new skills into practice. It was accurate because I learnt the language.

Lynda:

efficiency: it costs money to have a membership, my school provides one to all the students. It takes quite a bit of time to watch all of the videos and to then get the certificate, but you can just the videos running on in the background and you get a certificate. There is quite a bit of effort if you sit and watch all the videos

effectiveness: I feel it wasn’t very suitable format for me  to learn code because you just watch a video and don’t get to actually code and see where you go wrong.

So in the end, I prefer the system that Codecademy has, and I like getting rewarded with badges

 

A Holiday Project

I have wanted to code for a while, since ive gotten into I.T., so I set out a project to do over the holidays, learn to code.

I have started a coding course online at CodeAcademy. So far so good, learning the basics, starting with HTML which i have learnt stands for HyperText Markup Language. I am so proud when finish a course of changing the colour of text, or changing the font. I feel very swaygg

Swatchmate Cube

Our assignment was to find a technology which we were excited about. I did some research on the internet and wasn’t finding anything, so I asked my dad for some guidance. He told me about a Kickstarter which is backed and got funded. So the technology I am excited about is the Swatchmate Cube.

It is from Melbourne, made by some engineering students from Melbourne university. So it is described as a “colour capturing cube”. it captures the colour off of any surface which you like and saves it to your phone or directly onto editing programs to be used. It was designed to capture inspirational moments you get while out. the cube is small and quite cute I gotta admit.

It should be avalible in June of this year. Cant wait to capture all of the colours

 

Teaching Nanny

On the first weekend of the holidays I visited my grandparents so while I was there I helped my nanny with her new Surface

First Post of the Holidays

So four days into the school holidays I feel I should do a post about what we have done so far in the I.T. course. I feel the best way to do this is to highlight my favourite part of the course.

 

The part of the course which I was most interested in was the tour of the schools server room. I found it interesting because it gave me some perspective on how big the schools server is and the amount of people who use it and how we take it for granted ever day without knowing how much work goes on behind the scenes.

First I.T. Outcome!

Just completed my first i.t. outcome so it was time to write a reflection… of course.

Strengths	Weaknesses	Opportunities	Threats
Strengths in my outcome I feel was my word cloud I created, I feel I added   something different to the poster, and also the map of Victoria. I was very   proud of my end product because I spent a lot of time working on it and it   was like my baby in a way.	My graphs, I had big ideas for them but I wasn’t sure about how to   create it, but over time my skills will grow and I will be confident using   excel. Also my traffic light chart could’ve been better, I wish I could’ve changed   the colour of the graph like around it to match better with the themes	I felt this was a taste of what a sort of job in it would be like, having   to validate data, deal with a large amount of data and everything, it was a   new experience. Also having a time limit was eye opening I had to properly think   out the project to get it done in time.	I wish I had spent some more time on the excel part to make my graphs   better and maybe some better graphic  design   skills to make my poster look a little better. Like I was super proud of it   an all but I wish it could’ve been a little better

 

2048

This game is distracting me at the moment from doing research on Melbourne water for my I.T. infographic project

It is like flappy bird for maths lovers

Give it a go

Can you get to 2048?

Infographics

 What are infographics?

Infographics are a visual representation of data and information in an easily understood way. they usually take complex ideas and represent them easily. they focus on the humans ability to understand information better when it is presented in a visual way, they focus on patterns in the data to get through the idea of the infographic. To create an infographic they use data visualisation, information design and information data.

Infographic Task

While creating an infographic I have been inspired by a few I have found online. There are different parts of some I wish to incorporate in the Water Watchers infographic as I feel they are what I want to convey in my infographic solution for Water Watchers.

Solution Statement

The Water Watchers Association of Victoria monitors the water available in Victoria and encourages good usage of water as it is a valuable resource in Australia.

A report released recently by the CSIRO and Bureau of meteorology provides a snapshot of how Australia’s weather has changed over the past 2 years. It shows that southeast Australia received a 15% decline in the late autumn and early winter rainfall since the mid–1990’s. In this climate of declining water supplies but growing population the importance of monitoring water usage and change is paramount to our future.

This infographic solution will show the change over the years of 2001-2012 of water in Melbourne’s major catchment areas and the variation which has occurred over the years from droughts. The data will be presented in an easily interpreted way which will catch the general publics attention about the water supplies of Victoria. It needs to include visual representations of the data, links to relevant websites and inform the water users of Victoria the reality of the water storage.

Lynda.com

Hello, this week in I.T we are learning about Excel and how to use it, so part of this course was using Lynda.com to give us tutorials on Excel.

I have prepared a table about its strengths and weaknesses.

 

Strengths	Weakness
–            It gave you step by step instructions with   using Excel	–            I found the guy who was instructing, Dennis, somewhat   weird and condescending, but it may just be the sort of how to video format
–            It taught me some short cut things I didn’t know   before	–            Some of the things were quite easy and seem   like common knowledge about backspacing to change text.
–            It gave you real life examples of how the   program would be used which gives you perspective	–            If you are a more of a hands on learning it wouldn’t   work for you, it would probably be better to have a person with you instructing   you instead of a virtual one.
–            I also liked the closed captions which I used   as it was easier to follow	–            The course is somewhat formal which I don’t enjoy   personally, no sense of humour
–            You can jump around the tutorials to see what   you want to learn about as they are titled appropriately	–            Lack of exercises to practice your new skills

 

This is a picture of the Lynda.com homepage

I also have found some articles about the disadvantages of online tutorials. But also some advantages.

This is how I feel about spreadsheets, SPREADSHEET ALL THE THINGS!

picture from here