Comment area for Week of March 13

Comment area for Week of March 13

One of my regular questions on this class is: Do you like the GUIs, or would you rather have more media? So what do you think: Keep the GUIs, or toss them in favor of more media?
Or, go even further than just GUIs, to talk about (say...) how to build double-clickable applications in Java?
We're making the shift with GUIs, from lists and trees, to simulations. Is it working okay?

Whaddya think?

Well, I don't really see how we're doing a simulation... It seemed like we were more on the brink of simulation with turtles...
But, I imagine that it will all become clear soon enough, and I am strongly convinced that we should stick with GUIs–I don't think they'll be very hard once we do a few, and they're useful; what's the fun of a program with no useful interface? (And knowing how to do an actual application would be great. It feels a little silly to be running everything from Dr Java or a command line, especially now that we have user-friendly input.)
~Jim

Yes, all will become clear...bwahahaha. :-) No, seriously – simulations come next. I will take the input about GUIs seriously, thanks. ("input about GUIs" – sorry, no pun intended.) I'll see if I can beef up the GUI content in future semesters. Mark Guzdial

I personally like to work with media myself, but I can certainly see how it would be useful for me to learn both. But I think the class should focus more on media than GUIs. I don't see knowing how to make a GUI being more important than knowing how to manipulate the media the GUI is connected to.

Now, we've done media and GUIs, and now we're doing simulations. Maybe you'll like simulations even better than media! Mark Guzdial

Unrelated question: Will there be any more extra credit assignments? It's not that I don't work or try, but ever since I screwed up HW1, I can't seem to balance my grades back out. And HW1 was a loooooong time ago. Seriously that zero(which I got from uploading the assignment incorrectly...I didn't know there were 2 uploads)hurt a lot. The pain still haunts me

I wasn't planning on any extra credit assignments, but I'll give it some thought. (Is that some kind of phantom pain? :-) Mark Guzdial

I didn't know HW assignments could cause physical pain, but apparently getting a zero on a HW assignment CAN hurt a lot. I did a little calculation. So, I made up hW grades from 70-100, which I think is the range everyone who tries to make HWs will usually fall into. So, with 9 grades I averaged about 75-92, but with 8 grades(1 zero) the averages drops about 7-8 points. So one zero can take a person with an 80-ish average in HWs down to a C, which is bad. Ouch.

Yes, but the Homeworks count for a whopping 10% of our grade... A zero only takes you down 3 points–not bad all things considered (I mean, let's face it, a zero is never going to have only a negligible effect). So while it has a very impressive impact on the homework percentage, that's only a tiny bit of our overall grade. And, there's extra credit :) 25 points for 6.5, and everything else has about 10 extra points. With 9 homeworks, 10 pts(ish) each, and a 25 point bonus, you can easily make up that 100 points...
Just trying to make someone out there feel better. :) ~Jim

Um....I was pretty sure Homeworks counted for 30% of our grade. At least they are according to the grading policy. The only thing worth more are exams at 50%, so a low HW grade will cost more than 3 points I think.......

Ah.. My bad, sort of. Homeworks are 30% of the grade. But somehow, my math was still right (eek). You'll lose 3.3 points for a zero on one homework. If they were only 10% (as I'd pretended), you'd lose barely a point! So just read the other parts of that post. Plus, the part about there being enough extra credit to fully make it all up still holds :)
~Jim

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Comment Areas-Spring 2006 last edited on 9 April 2006 at 6:27 pm by vpn-dhcp199.cc.gatech.edu