This year I learned skills applicable in the real world. I completed projects I considered easy, and others that were more challenging. These challenging projects brought out the best in me and strengthened certain qualities. Some quality strengths stood out compared to others. This year, I developed my persistence thanks to challenges presented by my programming and ECON classes.

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The first project I would like to cover is the Chapter 13 project called “Pizza Place”. To give some context, let me explain how programming course work is divided. Each topic is divided into a chapter. There are several lessons in a chapter that go over sub-topics. At the end of the chapter, we write a program that incorporates everything we learned in the chapter. All of these were difficult, some more than others. As annoying as that was, looking back on it this is where the most improvement of my skill could occur. For this project, we were tasked with creating a graphical program to collect data that users inputted for their order at a pizza place. To do this, we had to use everything we learned in chapter 13 about the different ways programmers could collect the data from users. Setting up the look of the program was not too difficult. However, getting the actionPerformed() method to work was difficult. To give some context, this method allowed certain actions to be taken based on data inputted by users. Without this method working, the program would not work. To find the solution, it took a lot of persistence. I looked up information about how to collect the data I wanted in the actionPerformed() method. When I thought I came up with a solution, I tried it only to have it fail. Since I was trying to collect data from an array variable rather than a variable, the getSelectedItem() or getText() commands do not work. After several days, I finally had a solution. To get values from an array variable, the getSelectedValues() command had to be used. When used alone, the getSelectedValues() command outputs one of the selected values contained in the array variable. To fix that problem, I created a for loop that read all indexed values and output all values selected.

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The second project I would like to cover is the Chapter 10 project called “Dog House”. For this project we were required to create a dog object and program it to respond to certain actions a certain way. In order to complete this project, we utilized our knowledge about object oriented programming (OOP). The initial steps that were required were not too difficult. However, and the end of the program I had a glitch in the dog’s behavior. We were told to make the dog yawn if it had eaten more than two times. However in my initial program, there was a glitch that allowed the dog to eat an infinite amount of times and never yawn. This was because of two reasons. First, the code that detected the value of the number of times it was fed looked for values greater than two. When the value was run through, at the time the program was supposed to print out yawn, it showed a value of two. Therefore, it did not satisfy the parameters looking for a value greater than two. The fix was simply to change the parameters to look for values two and greater. Second, the code that increased the value of the number of times fed was broken. It was written in a way that was not concise, so java could not understand it very well. The fix was simply to use the ++ command which was a simpler way to say add one to this variable’s value. It took persistence to find these fixes because bugs are hidden in obscure places. To make it worse, the text editor did not know to look for it because nothing was wrong, it was simply not behaving the way I thought it would.

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The third project I would like to cover is my ECON Stock Market Project. To give some context, let me explain how this project works. The first is actually trading stocks and tracking transactions. The second part is working with your group to make money. The third part is working with your client. Before the project began, we had a practice round to try out our strategies. I had previous experience using the stock trading simulator, so I was very overconfident. I almost regretted that. I forgot that due to the nature of the stock market, strategies that worked before were probably not applicable now. As a result, I spent the first week coming up with a new strategy. This required persistence because most of the information available about this topic is either not reliable or not right for me. I had trouble finding the right strategy for me. After the first week, I came up with one that worked better for me. The simulator we used provides users with names of stocks that are doing abnormally good or bad. I combined this with the old strategy to buy low and sell high. Lastly, I had to figure out was how to monitor stock prices, while making transactions at precisely the right time. It was difficult and took extraordinary amounts of persistence, but I finally found a way to tie it all together. The winning strategy was having two windows open. The first one would be used to monitor a stock I was thinking about trading. The second window was used to monitor information about other stocks while making sure I timed trades at the right moment.

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This year I learned life skills that applicable in a future career. Projects presented to me challenged prior knowledge, and forced me to overcome my limits. Doing so was difficult and required persistence every time such a challenging project was presented. Thanks challenges presented to me by my programming and ECON classes, I developed my persistence.