Project three photo

Couldn't get access to the R drive so I am posting my picture here.

DSDN 142 Project 3

I finished my animation on Saturday and tomorrow is the presentation. I am quite proud of the way it turned out. After showing it to some people at the hall I found that with out any knowledge about what the animation was about people did not get it. Once I explained that it was a metaphor for a coding operation, those who had experience with coding all knew straight away that it represented a loop. Those without knowledge of coding got what the metaphor was after an explanation on what a loop is and how it works, and generally thought it was a good metaphor.

Another aspect that people were impressed about after seeing other animations I have done this year was how smooth the car moved compared to my normally jerky animations.

From what I have observed, I believe that the metaphor I have made is a strong metaphor that helps people with little knowledge of loop to understand them.

DSDN 142 Project 3 interim presentation

Yesterday I had an interim presentation to the class about my ideas for the third project.  Due to my busy week my ideas were not yet fully formed, but from what I come up with so far the strongest metaphor for a loop was the racing car track.

When we first broke off into our groups to discuss our ideas the group suggested trying to make the track using slot cars.  I thought this was a cool idea and so did the tutors but due to the probably high cost and my little knowledge of slot cars the idea was dismissed.  Instead I decided to show my metaphor through a short animation.

When I went up to present my idea to the whole class the idea of using fuel was thought to be a bit too much for the loop and so was taken out, instead just focusing on the laps left which gave a clearer idea of how the variables change over time.  Also I have to come up with a way to show the laps left without using numbers as the tutors that using numbers would be to obvious and that a more subtle way of showing the laps left would produce a better result.  

Overall the tutors thought my metaphor to be very strong which makes me confident going further into this project.

Final hand in for project 2

Over the easter break I made very few adjustments to how the program actually worked. Most of the work that I did on the assignment was to make the code easier to read and commenting the code to make it understandable.

There were two changes I made to the program. The first was originally the sound made was based on the x position of the ball on the screen. I changed this to the x position of the blocks that the ball collided with, as this seemed to make more logical sense.

The other change I made to the code was make it so that when the down key is pressed the ball changed color. When the ball is white it bounces better than when the ball is black. I added this because the white ball makes more interesting sounds when thrown around the screen but if it is bouncing in one place it can take a long time for it to stop moving, which makes an annoying sound. The black ball stops bouncing a lot faster and is not so annoying but can but does not make as interesting sound.

I will try to post it on the blog but I am having problems with uploading it to open processing which is why the reserved space in the last post is still there.

As a final note, which I forgot to put in my code, thanks to Richard Marxer for his fisica libary, it helped me HEAPS!