## Posts Tagged ‘Programming’

September 23, 2017

One of my favorite sessions at TMC17 was the CO+DE=MATH session by Tamar McPherson (@teachme124) and Stephanie Reilly (@reilly1041). They introduced me to trinket.io, which I really like because you can write code on the left side of the screen and run it on the right side of the screen. I am going to be attempting to do a couple of classes with my Pre-AP Geometry classes this week on coding. We’re going to do some of the Hour of Code problems on code.org on the first day, and then I’m going to attempt to introduce them to Python using trinket on the second day. In the process, I decided I’d have some fun and try to write a program to simplify radicals. I wish I could embed it, but WordPress won’t do frames.

Enter a square root you want to simplify (ex. $\sqrt{75}$), and it will give you the simplified radical (ex. $5\sqrt{3}$). Here it is: Simplifying Radicals

## You Can Go Home Again (At Least to Visit)

April 26, 2017

I’m one of those alt-cert teachers who was in another career before I decided to become a teacher. Specifically, I spent 20+ years as a computer programmer and network administrator. When I started teaching, people would wonder why I didn’t want to teach computer programming, and I would tell them that I was just burned out on computers.

It’s been long enough now that I feel a little nostalgic about writing programs to do things, and when my principal “suggested” that we keep a log of students going to and coming from the bathroom I decided I’d rather try to write a program to keep track than have to keep track by using a clipboard (along with students’ not knowing how to tell time).

My background is in database programming using a program called Visual FoxPro. Visual FoxPro was discontinued by Microsoft around 2009, so I initially tried to write my program using Access. I gave it a good try, but I could tell that I was trying to make it do things that it wasn’t really designed to do. I honestly feel I made a good-faith effort to find some other RDBMS (relational database management system), but in the end, I knew FoxPro would do what I wanted to do.

The most frustrating part of writing my hall pass program was realizing that it was taking me hours to do tasks that I used to be able to do in minutes, just because I was rusty. As I worked on the program, a lot of things came back to me, and I’ve ended up with something that I’m pretty proud of. What’s more, my students have fallen into the new routine with nary a whimper.

The only really frustrating part of the implementation is that it has to run from a physical hard drive (since that’s all that was around when this version of FoxPro was written), and the only spare laptop I have is a little Dell NetBook that runs WindowsXP and is named “Baby”. I wanted to use DropBox so that I could run the program on Baby but also reference the data on either my school laptop or my personal laptop. Unfortunately, DropBox doesn’t run on WindowsXP. I’m currently running Google Drive, which is doing this pretty well, but it is often random on how it updates.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun to play with programming again, and it really makes me want to look around for other things that I could program as well as trying to find ways to integrate programming into my Geometry classes.