[RESOLVED] Have a nice year.

[jlcame]

Hi. I deleted my post and title for privacy concerns. Thank you and have a nice year.

[jmcilhinney]

It concerns me that this is your second attempt at this class and yet you have nothing to show that you've made any progress at all on this assignment. How about you tell us what you think might be useful and we can go from there. Otherwise, you really either asking us to do your work for you, which would be cheating, or else to teach you how to program, which is what the class is for in the first place. If you have done the work so far for the class and really have no idea then I really think that you just shouldn't be doing the class at all. I'm not trying to be mean but students don't have an inherent right to pass if they have no clue how to do the work. I'd be more than happy to help but I'd need to see some evidence of effort and progress on your part first.

Note that you don't even have to start at the beginning. The biggest mistake beginners make is to try to tackle the problem as a whole. Instead, break the problem up into smaller and smaller parts and tackle each of them separately, then combine the partial solutions into a whole. That way, you can work on parts from the middle and end even if you can't work out how to do the first part. If you're working on small, simple problems then it's much easier to find relevant information online. For instance, people often search for information on performing a specific calculation and saving the result to a file and fail to find anything, when if they searched for the specifics of the calculation independent of writing data to a file then they'd likely find plenty of information on both.

I suggest that you pick up a pend and paper and start writing down the obvious parts of the problem and then work on each one separately. For each part, break it down further if you can. You can treat each part as a black box with no need to care where the pipes coming in or going out lead. Once you have the boxes doing their specific jobs, you just need to connect the pipes, which means writing the code to get the output of one part to be the input for another.

[jlcame]

Ok, im sorry. I misjudge the forum.
Have a nice holiday

[jmcilhinney]

I misjudge the forum.

How so? What exactly were you expecting? I'm asking sincerely. If you expected that someone would simply write the code for you then I would agree that you have made a misjudgement. If you were hoping for someone to teach you how to do the assignment then try looking at it from our point of view. This is your second attempt at the class and there's no sign of any progress on the assignment. We don't know what the class has entailed but, based solely on what we can see here, you've learned nothing from doing it twice. We could certainly try to go at it and teach you something but how do we know that you haven't already gone over that twice? We have no idea what you do or don't already know. If you can give us an indication of what you have tried so far and where you're struggling then at least we have something to work with. If all you do is say "here's the assignment question, discuss" then it really seems like you're expecting us to do a great deal of the work.

I'll leave it there. Maybe someone else will choose to provide more on spec but, as I said, I'd be happy to do so but only with some show of effort from you first. If you're not up for that effort then that's certainly your prerogative.

[jlcame]

Well i might as well vent then...
I'm coming here because this teacher dosent teach anything. I only have a couple of hours per week with him and the whole semester is just me sitting at the computer, with sheets of paper telling me what each command does, like dim as int does this and that, and the whole class hour is just me copying these commands to VB and see what it does. Thats it. The only program we build was a "hello world" button. And now he slaps us with this 1000x more complex task, just like last year, and tell us that we should paid more attention to the class when any of us ask anything about the assignment. I can assure you, 90% of people in this class either has a mate that really dig VB, or just straight up copy from the other classmate.
I did really well in math, quimistry and fisics related classes, but when i get this retarded class i just get furious about how unavailable the teacher is and how the class themselves didn't provide any experience to produce an assignment like this.

I can assure, i just didn't pass last year because:
a: I didn't have a mate pro at VB
b: I didn't want to straight up copy from my class mates, like most of them did and now are laughing at me.

With this thread i was searching for guidance, not complete codes or something like that, just some strings that i could work on, like, how do i make the grid?
But forget it, i'll just do like most of my class mates did last year, copy from somebody eles and make some changes to it.
I understand your position, i would not give a pass to a freeloader too, and i'm not trying to justify myself with this.

Once again, thank you for the time and have a nice year.

[jmcilhinney]

If your class is so bad (I'm certainly aware that many are quite poor) then I would suggest that you start by finding some online tutorial(s) that will give you a decent grounding in the basics. There are a number of possibilities but this is the most-often recommended around here:

http://www.homeandlearn.co.uk/NET/vbNet.html

I often recommend that the first step in solving a programming problem is to forget that it's a programming problem. Pretend that it is a problem that someone with no prior exposure to the domain has to solve manually, e.g. with pen and paper. Your task is to provide that person with a set of elementary steps that they need to perform to do that. If you can create a set of steps that you can follow yourself with pen and paper and get the right result then you have just created an algorithm. Now it's time to remember that it's a programming problem.

Now that you have an algorithm, you can start writing pseudo-code. If you're not aware pseudo-code is instructions that resemble actual code in that they are somewhat formalised, i.e. not plain English, but they are not in any specific programming language. What language they most resemble and whether they resemble any existing language is up to you. The idea is provide a code-like series of elementary statements that implement your algorithm. It's important that the statements are elementary, e.g. don't write things like "calculate the sum and average of the values" but rather write out the steps in actually performing those calculations.

Note that you don't really need any actual programming experience to get to this point. The less experience you have, the rougher your pseudo-code is likely to be but it doesn't really take any actual experience to get something down. It just takes a logical, methodical approach. If you good at science subjects then that shouldn't be a stretch.

Now it's time to start writing some actual VB code. The fact that your pseudo-code statements are very elementary means that, if you need to do any research to find out how to do something in VB, you can use very specific keywords and you're likely to find the best results. Anything you're still having trouble with, you can post about at a forum like this. Again, your can ask a very specific question so you're likely to get a very specific answer very quickly.

[ChrisE]

Hi jlCame,

you are Lucky to start Programming with the resources of Today..Internet; Tut's put Online by people etc...

so don't give up, look at the Link JMC gave you

regards
Chris

p.s. when I started the was no Internet

[Sitten Spynne]

Here's a few thoughts. At the end I'm going to talk about your project, but I don't think it's going to be a happy paragraph for you either.

We hear "my teacher doesn't teach" a lot in response to, "What have you tried?". Even when it's honest, it's not useful information and everyone's time, including yours, is wasted by it. We ask the question for 2 reasons:

1. To prove you're invested enough in finding an answer to put forth some effort.
2. To judge your skill level so we can decide where to start.

(2) is really the more important answer. We need to know exactly how far you can get before you get stuck. That can save us hours of time spent writing out explanations for things you already know.

If you answer is "I know nothing" we can't help you at all yet. There are far too many books and tutorials available about the basics of writing a simple application: variables, arrays, control flow, application structure. These are the "addition" of programming. If you don't know them, anything we write is going to confuse you, and we'll have to waste time backtracking and rewriting examples to explain them. You HAVE to get there before we can speak about this boat problem.

It's not that I won't answer, "I know nothing", but it will severely clog up this thread. And there are dozens and dozens of tutorials and books that help at this stage of your development: even bad tutorials are adequate. Find an "in 31 days" book, they aren't "good" in many programmers' eyes, but they teach at this level. So the best thing to do if you know nothing at all is to expect to spend 2 weeks working through tutorials and posting different threads here asking for help understanding it.

If you can't do that because it's too late in the class, I'm sorry. One of the hardest things I've had to learn is to loudly admit I don't know what I'm doing and seek help as soon as I realize it. It hurts to admit it, and doesn't feel good. But any time I spend making no progress because I'm completely lost is time wasted. If you retook a course you already failed once, struggled again, and only reached out for help when the deadline for the final assignment loomed that was a very bad idea and I'm afraid you've wasted another semester. Keep in mind the "...in 31 days" books are about the level of "I know nothing", and their own title suggest it takes about a month to master their concepts. You need to be comfortable with most of what one of those covers to do this assignment.

For actual help:

You need to do SOMETHING, even if it's not quite what the assignment asks. Make the boat move in a constant square. Make it do a zig-zag. Just say "I want to make the boat do X" and write a program that makes the boat do that. If you can, we'll see what topics you already know and can help more accurately. If you can't, you need to focus on tutorials and post other threads to help you work through them. I think if you are talented and focus 100%, it will still take several days.

To me, the assignment is still not very clear. It's deleted now so I can't be specific, but here's what I don't get.

To do the assignment, I'd have to make the boat move in a pattern. That involves setting a heading and a speed, waiting for it to move some distance, then adjusting heading and speed again. I'd repeat those steps until I was satisfied the boat had either found the target or the boat had gone in "enough" circles. I remember it had a method to set the speed, a method to set the course, and a method to check if the target had been found. But I didn't see any methods that were like, "wait for this long, or for the boat to have moved this distance". Maybe that's what the method "fastS()" did, but I remember your description left that unclear.

But assuming we had some method to wait like that, the outline of how to get the boat to move in a spiral pattern is kind of clear:

Loop:
    Set the heading for the next direction.
    Set the speed so the boat will move.
    Wait for the boat to reach the 'destination'.
    If the target was found:
        Success! Stop looping and note the time.

This basic structure raises a few questions and implies some notes this pseudocode doesn't use:

• I need to keep track of time, so we can report how long it took the boat to find its target.
• I need to do some work to define what "get the next direction" means.
• I need to do some work to define "how long do I wait" or "how do I know when the boat finishes this segment?" (Your post didn't give me enough information for this.)

So the final structure might look something like:

Let $time be a variable for tracking time set to 0.

Loop:
    Set the heading for the next direction.
    Set the speed so the boat will move.
    Wait for the boat to travel as far as desired.
    Add the amount of time passed to $time.
    If the target was found:
        Success! Stop looping and note the time.

(This is, in a nutshell, what he was asking you to do on paper. I've been programming for more than 10 years, and I still tend to write out ideas like this before writing any code if the problem is complex. Even when I don't use paper, I usually type things that look like this into Visual Studio then replace each sentence with code that does the thing.)

That's as far as I could take you with the information I had before you deleted it. JMC isn't being frustrated for the sake of it here: if you'd posted some small program to show what you had that might have been the difference between 6 hours of his time and 2 hours of his time. That's a big deal.

[Shaggy Hiker]

And now you can see why Sitten said that starting from nothing would clog up the forum.

I assume the OP has departed, but they suggested that this class might be somehow military associated. That puts me in mind of Stonewall Jackson, who was a notoriously bad teacher before he became a southern general in the US Civil War. He was known for droning through a lecture, and if anybody asked a question, he'd repeat the lecture verbatim as an answer. I'm fortunate never to have known a teacher that bad.

Despite this being the internet age, I still think that having two books would be good when starting out. One book never quite covers it, since every writer will emphasize different points, even on the same topic. I had two books in ASM, and two books in C++, as references early on. In both cases, I felt that one of the books was better than the other overall, but in both cases, the other book was better than the first in some specific areas. Two books, taken together, seemed to provide a pretty comprehensive reference when starting out. The same might be said of online tutorials, but even then you'd likely want a reference. The link that JMC provided seems like it could act as a reference AND a tutorial, but you still might need a second one.