High School IT PAT Competition Entry

[Hamster]

I was a bit hesitant at first! But then I convinced myself that if I want to be good at the whole programming thing, I need to subject myself to all possible criticism.

Well in that case just do yourself one favour and go to a proper university and do a BSc or NDip. Do not go to to these second-rate "international" certification schools like CTI.

 

[Laz.]

Question: which other programming languages do you know?

I don't KNOW any programming languages yet. (You probably need to work through a book or something so you can learn ALL areas of a programming language instead of just learning the sections you need before you can claim you "know" it?)

I am semi-literate in Delphi, HTML, CSS, PHP, JS+jQuery.
I also dabbled with C# a bit back when I was trying to create my own mXit game.

 

[Laz.]

Bug: doesn't work on my iphone

I actually tried to separate my algorithms/"business"-logic into their own units, so that if I decided to create a mobile app I could just revise the UI and reuse most of my code. I didn't get round to it (I was writing prelims).

 

[Laz.]

great effort, for matric.

you dont have to worry about someone claiming that code as their own (mostly due to the fact that you have 280+ event handlers in your main form ), well maybe another PAT student

I would suggest you read and follow the borland/embargo style guide - http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/10280

Thank you! Yes I do have a bucketload of event handlers, mainly to update the hover effects of the buttons.

When I have some free time again (It's finals now) I'll definitely read through the guide.

 

[Laz.]

haha you would give some people at university a run for their money.

If this is true, then I am very glad to know that I am good enough to be able to compete with my peers. Thank you!

 

[Laz.]

Well in that case just do yourself one favour and go to a proper university and do a BSc or NDip. Do not go to to these second-rate "international" certification schools like CTI.

Will do. I am looking at a BSc(CompSci), but things have become a bit complicated. I won a 3-year bursary to go and study at NWU, but it's limited to BSc(IT). On one hand I really want to study CompSci, on the other I also want to save my parents some money.

 

[Laz.]

Depends on the school. Btw OP you're part of the CAPS syllabus, how's that going?

It's hard to say, as I have only been on the CAPS syllabus, so I have nothing to compare my experience to. I will say that according to my teachers, it seems to be really full and crammed (feels that way too). Most of the people at my school also agree that it is harder than the previous syllabus, based on marks and what the teachers say.

 

[semaphore]

Its a high school project...

Man my highschool project wasn't even stable...even by modest criteria. Still...it was the best in the year and the teacher was decidedly outgunned, so still got A+.

Sorry I'm not impressed, I wrote my own first commercial software at 15 in c++, it's still used to this day in a car rental company.

Even thou it's a high school project, pride can me taken.

 

[rorz0r]

Will do. I am looking at a BSc(CompSci), but things have become a bit complicated. I won a 3-year bursary to go and study at NWU, but it's limited to BSc(IT). On one hand I really want to study CompSci, on the other I also want to save my parents some money.

Can't you study comp sci in bsc it? I did a bsc it at uct which was basically compsci. There was no bsc compsci there though.

As for your 280 event handlers what you'll find as you learn more is that you can actually reduce a lot of code to a little bit of more generic code. I'm assuming half of those event handlers do the same thing (haven't looked at your app at all).

As for my high school project, i used opengl and made some stuff in 3D which was "wow". I used c++ as we could use whatever we wanted but the teacher only knew turbo pascal and was trying to teach java. Essentially i just got a good mark because it looked cool and no one understood the code.

 

[Laz.]

Sorry I'm not impressed, I wrote my own first commercial software at 15 in c++, it's still used to this day in a car rental company.

Even thou it's a high school project, pride can me taken.

I tried my best. Have you actually run the application? If so, could you be a bit more specific as to exactly where I could have done better? I'd really appreciate it.

 

[Laz.]

Can't you study comp sci in bsc it? I did a bsc it at uct which was basically compsci. There was no bsc compsci there though.

As for your 280 event handlers what you'll find as you learn more is that you can actually reduce a lot of code to a little bit of more generic code. I'm assuming half of those event handlers do the same thing (haven't looked at your app at all).

As for my high school project, i used opengl and made some stuff in 3D which was "wow". I used c++ as we could use whatever we wanted but the teacher only knew turbo pascal and was trying to teach java. Essentially i just got a good mark because it looked cool and no one understood the code.

They do mention CS in there. I'll have to contact them for some more info. Am I right to think it looks a bit more business-orientated? (accounting, business management).

The event handlers are basically only one-liner calls to a procedure that changes the hover effect of the button.
e.g. OnMouseEnter - apply hover effect.
e.g. OnMouseExit - remove hover effect.

All these add up to a whole load of event handlers. I'm probably doing something wrong.

Your project sounds very interesting.

 

[nand]

Sorry I'm not impressed, I wrote my own first commercial software at 15 in c++, it's still used to this day in a car rental company.

Even thou it's a high school project, pride can me taken.

Don't you sometimes just want to rip it apart and do it over? I sucked so much when I was younger.

 

[nand]

I don't KNOW any programming languages yet. (You probably need to work through a book or something so you can learn ALL areas of a programming language instead of just learning the sections you need before you can claim you "know" it?)

I am semi-literate in Delphi, HTML, CSS, PHP, JS+jQuery.
I also dabbled with C# a bit back when I was trying to create my own mXit game.

Knowing something is rather subjective, let's not get into that.

But stop what you're doing right now, turn around, and forget everything you've read about PHP. Learn another Pascal language, like C or Python.

PHP is arguably the WORST language you can begin with, so many things are just wrong.

PS. Google Lisp

 

[rorz0r]

View attachment 159460

They do mention CS in there. I'll have to contact them for some more info. Am I right to think it looks a bit more business-orientated? (accounting, business management).

The event handlers are basically only one-liner calls to a procedure that changes the hover effect of the button.
e.g. OnMouseEnter - apply hover effect.
e.g. OnMouseExit - remove hover effect.

All these add up to a whole load of event handlers. I'm probably doing something wrong.

Your project sounds very interesting.

That looks like pretty much what i did. Major is computer science though.

I'm sure you must be able to attach all the buttons to 2 event handlers that just use a reference like "this" or "sender" which normally gets passed in as a parameter to the event handler proc.

 

[Messugga]

Bug: doesn't work on my iphone

Feature: doesn't work on iPhone

 

[Laz.]

Knowing something is rather subjective, let's not get into that.

But stop what you're doing right now, turn around, and forget everything you've read about PHP. Learn another Pascal language, like C or Python.

PHP is arguably the WORST language you can begin with, so many things are just wrong.

PS. Google Lisp

Thanks for the pointers. I'll check them out. I'm really interested in web dev. Python is probably my next move.

PS : I still want to try recreate something like this on my own to learn a bit more JS http://codepen.io/suffick/pen/KrAwx

 

[DA-LION-619]

It's hard to say, as I have only been on the CAPS syllabus, so I have nothing to compare my experience to. I will say that according to my teachers, it seems to be really full and crammed (feels that way too). Most of the people at my school also agree that it is harder than the previous syllabus, based on marks and what the teachers say.

Learning Scratch first can make things feel that way lol.

 

[Laz.]

That looks like pretty much what i did. Major is computer science though.

I'm sure you must be able to attach all the buttons to 2 event handlers that just use a reference like "this" or "sender" which normally gets passed in as a parameter to the event handler proc.

I'll look into that. When I was coding it and setting up all those event handlers, it certainly felt wrong.

 

[Caitlyn_10]

Hey. I have a similar project,need some help and guidance if you have the time.

 

[animal531]

Hey. I have a similar project,need some help and guidance if you have the time.

Laz is like a grandpa by now

If you have specific questions, post them here in the dev thread and then people can see if they can help you.