Project Examples
Hello, my name is Gavin MacNabb. I thought coding was stupid when I took a crash course in grade 8. I tried to make a button and I couldn’t get it to work, so I decided not to take it in grade 10 because it didn’t make sense. Thanks to my dad for giving me possibly the hardest semester anyone could possibly take, he told me computer science was an important course to take and made me try it, and I’ll have to say that coding for me has been one of my favourite courses I’ve taken in high school (next to gym class). Using creativity and problem solving skills to develop algorithms and projects is one of my strongest skills I could say I use, and coding has helped me implement that into ways that I can change the world. Taking grade 12 computer science was like taking a step into the deep end of the computer science world. Nothing made sense at first, but everything that I was told to do linked together in a big way and It was very satisfying to see everything that I learned throughout the year lead up to projects and summatives that I completed. Aswell, everything that I learned from my projects I’ll be using in the future on larger scaled programs, so this course taught me all the fundamentals to becoming a proficient coder. This website will outline my experience with Khan academy and some of the projects that I made on the website. I wish that I had more project’s to add to this portfolio, but I plan on developing an even better one over next semester on my own time and becoming an expert in a few languages before I get into university so I’m ahead of the game when it comes to that time.
Since that this section was all about the basics of JavaScript and learning how to use, I found it pretty boring when I first went through this section. Although it might be boring and somewhat repetitive, this section is the backbone to everything that I know how to do in Javascript. I used the challenges to work outside of the box and develop programs that we’re more interesting than the section that I was in. I spent an entire night moving squares and circles around to create Yoshi from Mario, which is something I’m pretty proud of and wish I added his other arm and leg. Not only did I make Yoshi in JS, but I used JS basic functions to create vector movement, object oriented programs and arrays in some of my projects I made. Javascript is an awesome language to code in, and I plan on mastering it as my primary language of choice.
Completing “The Nature of Code” by Daniel Shiffman on Khan Academy was an awesome experience for me as a beginner coder. The projects from this section took me outside of my comfort zone and as much grief that it brought me it was proven to very rewarding in the end. I learned how to develop more advanced programs that utilize physics engines and object orientation. I can take away from these projects and I plan on improving my space station code to create a vast solar system of particles that have specific functions.
This was probably the most mind numbing section to work through. HTML in general is boring and I find it to be my least favourite language as it’s not that cool, but HTML is probably the most important language to learn because it’s how you display information to people all over the world. I still have a lot to learn in HTML, and my projects were more or less a joke to get through the section, but I’m going to spend some time and work on developing an interactive website over the summer for my music. Mastering HTML is such a valuable tool to have as a coder and I’d be a chump if I decided not to pursue learning it properly.
I didn’t get through this section completely, partially because I decided to procrastinate and build a minecraft server with my time instead, but SQL is everything that I’d want to use as a programmer. Managing data is been something I’ve always been good at and interested in doing. Utilizing this language to build huge servers to hold information is very such a powerful tool as a programmer. I developed a small grocery store code. Inspired by my old job at sobeys, and I can invision how the database that the inventory program works. My employee’s always complained about how awful the program they used was, so maybe I can develop an easier to use database in the future?
After watching countless hours (yes, hours. I spent half my christmas break watching mandelbrot zooms in my room) of youtube videos on Mandelbrot zooms, I was very satisfied when me and michael developed a code to zoom into the mandelbrot set. Plotting “real” and “imaginary” numbers on a graph and watching how complex the fractal’s that were generated by the program was mesmerizing and beautiful. There is something about how the fractals are generated that is so satisfying to explore. Kianoosh also created an addition to our code that allowed you to zoom in and out a lot smoother, and made our code more functional than it was already. I love this program and I’ll be sending to a few of my math teachers and they were interested in looking at it as well.
Good news! I’ve applied to a few university computer science programs and have gotten into carleton university’s computer science program with a scholarship. I hope to pursue programming as my job when I’m older. Not only are there many conveniently close hightech companies located in Ottawa, but coding has become a passion of mine and I’d like to be able to develop huge programs for companies when I’m older. I’m not sure what sort of programing I’d like to do, if that's with developing video games or being the IT guys that helps build servers, but I’d be interested in pursuing anything type of programing that pays well and I enjoy doing. Coding has endless boundaries and I hope to push those boundaries as far as I can in university and beyond. My first project I plan on working on this summer is a interactive web page for my music. gmacfire is my soundcloud name, and im pretty proud of the music I’ve made on there. If you ever get the chance I have a playlist named “the album” with all of my best work producing music, love it if you took a listen to it.