A trace table is used by a programmer to help simulate the running of a program. The programmer dry runs the program, as they trace each line of code with their finger they record the values in a table that includes the line number of the program.
This is similar to TRACS but it requires the programmer to remember a lot more.
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So I was reading the BBC news website which has an article on GCHQ’s Christmas card.
This led me to wonder what is was as I hadn’t seen one before, it turns out it is a nonogram or picross. Then it suddenly hit me, this is a form of run length encoding, that we will be covering later in the course. It’s just that in this case the encoding is only for black squares. Anyway I just wanted to share it now while it was topical.
Today we analysed a pack of top trumps Beano cards. Pupils were asked to identify field names and types. This was then put into a table before we created the database in Access.
How do you think you would turn this database into a game?
This week we are going to create a database using Top Trumps as the information source.
What is your favourite?
For a bit of a change the class were programming in Python on a Raspberry Pi.
The program below was used to create a Gold Block in Minecraft.
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from mcpi . minecraft import Minecraft import mcpi . block as block mc = Minecraft . create () pos = mc. player . getPos () x = pos.x y = pos.y z = pos.z mc. setBlock (x, y, z, block . GOLD_BLOCK .id) |
Created using http://hilite.me/ and http://www.geocraft.org.uk/
This is a programming statement which increases by a known amount, each time it is called.
Incrementing counters are often used inside loops to keep track of the number of iterations.
In the example above the tries=tries+1 line is keeping track of how many times the loop has been iterated.
Today we investigated the use of the if statement, this is a selection statement which allows Python to make choices.
We have updated our dice roll program from last time to include a for loop and multiple if statements. The program now displays a summary of the results of 1000 dice rolls.
For homework the class were asked to TRACS the program and we will discuss how efficient it is next time.
Today the class carried out an investigation into the JPEG image compression technique. The pupils were tasked with finding out.
The Pupils had to report on a powerpoint slide and include an example of a good and bad use of JPEG.
Python is a general purpose language which means that it can be used to solve many different tasks. However Python does not have a command for every single eventuality. So programmers have created document with lots of different functions, these are called module libraries.
The import command is used to import module libraries into python programs.
The random module stores a number of functions, to get access to the function we want we must first import random then use dot notation to specify the function we want to call. So random.randint calls the randint function from the random module library we imported previously.
There are libraries to do many things and they all should come with documentation to make them easy to use. Like all python programs they are open source so you can have a look inside to see how they work. Here are some example
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