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DREU Blog: Week 3

Back to Week 2 Tuesday, June 1st

I had a nice long 3-day weekend since yesterday was Memorial Day. It was nice to get to relax and spend some time with the people I've met here so far. I also watched Duke play in the national championship for lacrosse. They ended up winning in overtime. It was a very exciting game. Tonight I think my roommates are moving in so I am excited to meet them.

Today I made some revisions to the catch tutorial that Professor Rodger suggested. It was mainly just making things bigger so they're easier to read and adding some extra explanations. I uploaded the new powerpoint so it should be ready to go. Then I continued working on my cooking show world. I added the second part where the user has to set the table. It is very simple so far, I will add more objects once I get a Spanish textbook to look at. I started making a tutorial on how to make the simplified version of the game. That version will only have the first part (not setting the table) and will have less ingredients. I will make sure to leave stirring the batter as one of the steps and also microwaving the butter. That part of the tutorial will explain how booleans work because they must use one to keep track of if the butter has been melted or not.

Wednesday, June 2nd Last night my two appartment mates moved in. They are both doing a program call Summer Research Opportunities (SROP). There are about 10 other people doing that program starting this week so I got to meet them. We went out to dinner and made a trip to Wal-Mart.

I spent most of today working on the cooking show tutorial. I wrote the whole PowerPoint but now I just need to go through it and do some major editing and add screen shots.

Over lunch, Professor Bruce Maggs, a CS professor, gave a presentation on ways that companies on the web can reduce costs. He talked about how they can distribute tasks to different data centers based on changing prices in that area.

Thursday June 3rd

Today I went through my cooking show tutorial and made the world from scratch again. I added screenshots to the powerpoint while I was doing that. Then I started making the changes I noticed it needed when I went through I. I'm starting to realize how tedious it can be making tutorials. But at least I get to use Spanish. ¡Olé!

We also started downloading the newest version of Alice onto the laptops the teachers will be using at the workshops.

Friday June 4th

Today I finished making the changes in my cooking that I made note of to fix yesterday. I also got some help from one of Liz's friends who knows Spanish. I had him proof read phrases I used in the cooking show. Making those changes took a while since I had to change a lot of the screen shots in my PowerPoint. Then I read a paper on Data Visualization Tools. I put a summary on my links page. Then I started making a new educational world. It is for practice with order of operations. An equation is displayed and the student must solve it step by step by clicking on the correct operators and solving that portion of the problem. They can click help to display the order of operations and at the end, the number of mistakes they made are displayed. It's a pretty simple world but I should be able to add to or modify it once Professor Rodger takes a look at it.



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