ElearningWorld.org

For the online learning world

Author: Gareth Barnard

Elearning WorldTechnical

Challenge accepted!

Recently a mate of mine had been mulling over a puzzle that he’d found via Reddit and couldn’t solve. It goes something like this “You can only be exactly twice someone’s age once, and it’s when they turn the same age you were when they were born. Every birthday after that makes you less than twice their age”. So I thought, ‘Hang on a moment! I’ve been writing calendar orientated small Java programs, Java has a “GregorianCalendar” class that I can use, and you can perform time functions! Challenge accepted!’.

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Elearning WorldLinuxTechnical

Some more Java

As a follow on from ‘A little bit more Java’, this time we will progress to look at how we can input from the command line and enhance our program even further. The beginnings of a program can be an uphill struggle as we work away to get something that actually does something. Now we’ve made progress, that hill will start to soften and we’ll be able to add more functionality now that we have our base.

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Elearning WorldLinuxTechnical

Calendar

In recent years, I’ve been creating a calendar using images that I’ve taken. Back in 2002, I created a small Java program that prints out the calendar for the next twelve months. In my themes and on the MoodleBites eLearningWorld theme courses I have code that arranges the Moodle blocks horizontally, this is partly facilitated through the employment of column CSS classes that are based upon the ideas implemented in the Bootstrap framework. Combine all of these thoughts, and add to my recent posts with Java then I thought ‘Why can’t I get Java to create a calendar just like the one I have printed?’. And that’s what this month is all about, where we will additionally see how pre-processing of HTML output can be designed and implemented from scratch.

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Elearning WorldLinuxTechnical

A little bit more Java

As a follow on from ‘A little bit of Java’, I thought that we’d progress into something a bit more complicated. The thing is with software creation is that the initial learning curve is steep, but once you’ve gotten over that then things do become easier. One way of climbing that initial curve is to have a defined goal with an outcome that you strive to reach. The program also needs to have a purpose so that it does something useful for us. Then we will be motivated to attain the goal of achieving our solution when things get tricky. Therefore our program will take text that we enter and apply a ‘Substitution cipher’ and tell us the result. That result we can then enter again and get what we originally typed back.

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Elearning WorldLinuxTechnical

A little bit of Java

Life is all about learning and maintaining the skills you have. I started off writing software in procedural languages, then moved on to C++, being object orientated, then Java came along and I fell in love with it. I found it much easier not having to worry about memory management and having so much ‘out of box’ components, especially graphical ones. So let us learn and revisit the language and discover it.

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Elearning WorldMoodleTechnical

Behat revisited

In the first two parts, I covered getting up and running with running acceptance tests sequentially, using a Ramdisk to speed things up, running tests in parallel, specifying a custom theme to test on and writing your own tests. Over a year later we revisit Behat to speed up the process of orchestrating the environment and to understand a bit more about what is going on. To understand this post, I recommend that you read the first two parts beforehand.

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Elearning WorldMoodlePedagogy

Infinite Monkey’s

There is a saying that I know of along the lines that given enough time then a group monkeys could type out the complete works of Shakespeare. This then lead to a thought on if it actually happened then would it be a copyright infringement? Probably not given the time that has transpired, but then consider if instead of it being a random act, then what if the monkeys had just copied the text by learning how to use the keys Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V effectively? Then how could we tell the difference? With that thought in mind, then how can assessors of work on an online eLearning platform then detect plagiarism?

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