Tia’s First Reflection Post

It’s only been two days and I feel like I’ve gone through a full week’s worth of classes. Learning a new language has been frustrating at times. This is because I know what I want to say, I just do not yet know or can easily recall how to say it in the new language I am learning. After completing the readings and exercises, I have realized that I prefer the hands-on work rather than the reading for this type of course. This finding about myself is the opposite of what I expected. I enjoy reading and for many other things I have learned over the years, they have mostly come from reading. Part of my preference for hands on activities could be that the language is still foreign to me, so reading causes me more angst in realizing that I have no clue what the author is talking about.

An example of a time I was frustrated with Python language is when reading about compiler vs. interpreter. After reading this in the text book, I clicked on the Quora link and read a comment that explained it in a way that I could understand. The comment mentioned having a letter written in French and having someone either translate the entire letter or interpret the letter line by line. That caused the light bulb to go on! I’ve reminded myself that soon the language will not seem so foreign. I’ll stick with it and work to train my brain to think differently. Now on to my Turtle Remix and the Exercises! – I hope the embed works 😊

Embedded Turtle Remix-

I continued to work on my Turtle Remix after class since I originally intended to create a diamond shape. Maybe I will call this a kite! I was determined to create a perfect diamond, but this is the closest I could get to a diamond. I have compromised with Python…this will do for now! Geometry was not and is not my thing so, figuring out the right angle and lengths of each line was going to take up too much time. After all, I had several other assignments to get to.

1st Exercise embedded below-

For each of the excercises, I am copying over my reflections that I submitted with my code. This exercise took me some time to figure out, because of the “Hello name” portion and the space between “Hello” and the name. I was able to recall from Chapter 2 that you can do the name = input, then print. I tried to use a comma in between hello and name to get the space. Can’t remember what I was trying to use before I remembered that I could use the + sign to put to strings together. All in all, my struggle helped because I found two ways to obtain the same output!

2nd Exercise embedded below-

This was challenging trying to figure out the Python language for multiplying the result of hours * rate. The error told me I could not multiply non-int so, that tipped me off that I needed to convert the numbers entered by the user to integers. I looked back at Chapter 2 and found an example. From there, I kept getting an error that said invalid literal. I also got an error saying I could not string an int and str. In trying to figure out how to get a number to display near words, I figured that if I could convert the entered data to integers, I should certainly be able to convert the result back to a string. This is how I came up with using “str (result)”. After I ran the programming, I received an error that tipped me off that the decimal in 2.75 was not accounted for in my programming. This is what caused me to use the same logic and convert that to a floating number. I am not sure if this is the “right” way to program this Exercise but, it worked!

3rd Exercise static code block is below-

tempC = input ('Enter temperature in degrees Celsius:')
convertedtemp = (float (tempC)*2)+30 #convert to Fahrenheit
print (convertedtemp)

I likely have gotten this one wrong due to my forgetting exactly what the equation is to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit. As far as the other programming, I guess struggling through the first two exercises helped me to have a good plan for how to tackle this one. The actual programming did not take long. Took me a while to figure out what the conversion could be. According to my Google sanity check, my conversion is off. Not sure if it is legal to change the conversion based on what I found via my Google search, so I will leave it as is.