Brian+Slain

My write up and project are at the bottom..Must extract the zipped file :)

Sometimes, we may not even know basic information about another person. Let’s start there.

What is your name?...My name is Brian Slain

Where do you graduate from?...I graduated from Naples High School

Where did you grow up?...I grew up in numerious places. New York, North Carolina, Pensacola Florida, were the places I spent my years before middle and high school. After that I moved to Naples Florida where I had finished up my schooling.

Looking at your entire life, recall a time when you felt the most alive, most excited, or most involved. Think deeply about this event. Please describe the event in detail, as if your partner where watching a movie of you.

My son being born was the moment in my life when I had felt most alive, excited, and involved.

What made this time a memorable experience?...It's indescribable. Joy, love, and just an overall feeling that you are in the process of experiencing a life changing time of your life.

Who was involved?...Besides me; my baby's mother of course and every single member of her family.

What were you doing?...Besides getting ice chips for my son's mom every five minutes I spent every second at the hospital just looking and staring at my son.

What emotions were you feeling?...Tears of joy and a self-realiztion that my life was about to completely change.

What sights, sounds, and smells do you remember?...Let's not go there ;-)

What did this experience mean to you?...The world!!!

What do these stories say about you as a person?...It made me an overall better person actually. I'm finally getting my life together because of my son. Life isn't just about me anymore.

What personal characteristics did you display?...Definitely tears of joy...Nonstop tears of joy.

Look through the eyes of the people that most believe in you and respect and value you. What would these people have to say about you?...That I'm a compassionate, loving, and giving person (At least I'd hope so).

What matters the most to you, for example, family, friends, work, and so forth?...Family means the world, without them I'm nothing.

What motivates you?...My son motivates me to succeed.

What are you good at?...I'm pretty decent at wirting, poetry, and hockey.

What do you value most about yourself as a person?...I value my compassion towards life in general.

I don't have any experience in programming except for the Intro to Programming alss I had taken last term.

Final Project Write-Up First off I’d like to start off with the fact that I truly enjoyed this course and like any other programming course that I’ve taken taught me the importance of patience. It was definitely a new experience due to the different syntaxes involved with VB but the overall idea of arrays, decision statements, loops, and declaration of variables, integers, etc… remain basically the same if you have been able to grasp that concept via another language. The overall structure of this course did not really challenge me in any way besides the fact of attempting to learn the new syntaxes. One thing that was challenging was the fact that I had originally started a different project with another person but he had dropped the class around week 4 or 5 and had half of our project on his flash drive so I was forced to start from scratch, work alone, and complete a project with a short deadline. Some advice that I would give students to take this class in the future would be to not just get scared the first two or three days and drop the course. When I took my first programming course I was terrified and didn’t have a clue as to what was going on; I know the feeling. Just stick with it and I guarantee by week three or four you will have lost some of that fear and will have gained the confidence needed to want to further your programming knowledge. If the student coming into to the class has had computer experience I would just recommend that they catch on to the syntaxes quickly and they shouldn’t have any problem what so ever catching on to the looping, decisions, and arrays. As far as the question that states “how can students realize that they know enough to help others with their programming problems” I would tell the student one of the first things that I had learned is that //almost// everyone in the class feels as if their classmates know tons more than them. This statement is completely false. Yes, there may be that select few in the class with a ridiculous amount of programming experience but basically and for the most part everyone is on the same level. It’s never too early to realize that you can help another student as it is a lot easier to find someone else’s mistakes rather than your own; besides two heads are always better than one. Yes, of course I would love to do another project like this one! I really enjoyed it and it was a great learning experience. It may have been better on me if I had a little help with it besides what I had received from RJ in class (meaning working with another person). The only thing I would have changed about the project experience would be that I would have never let the other half of that project out of my sight and kept the whole thing on my flash drive. Everything happens for a reason though and I guess this was meant to be…besides, I think I did a fine job alone J All in all I think that this class has prepared me greatly for future programming classes. I have further my ability to obtain patience when needed and the new syntax was a great learning experience as well. Just about every language has different syntaxes and you can never be too prepared for what is to come. This syntax was rather easy to catch onto but was good for the beginners (I still consider myself a beginner as well!!) I felt extremely accomplished after this project and had experienced a sense of self-satisfaction. I pretty much explained how I feel/felt about this class throughout the rest of this write-up as I am writing just an individual write up instead of a group and individual. Like RJ said “Programming is a skill that you learn”…which is extremely true. No one can just jump into it and expect to be able to write a ridiculous program. This class furthered my ability towards the understanding of loops, arrays, decision making, and new syntaxes. The only way one can ever get good at something is to practice and keep on practicing, even if it is via different languages it’s still practice because loops are loops and arrays are arrays no matter what language you are using.