My JavaScript Final Project

These past few days I have been spending a lot of time working on my final project for my JavaScript class. Web and graphic designers are notorious for being unaware of time passing and the necessity for food and sleep. I had to make sure I took breaks when I was working on it in the library at Moraine Park’s West Bend campus on Wednesday.

It’s an interactive application. My theme for the project is an aid for new artists to help them learn art basics. I’ve created a list of words and their definitions, and I’m working on making a quiz. Using JavaScript, a programming language, I’m writing code that will swap images with other images that show the answer to each question when you hover over the original image.

I still need to add more JavaScript to make it interactive. There is a long list of criteria to follow that goes all the way back to things we learned at the beginning of the semester. Luckily, I can look back through previous assignments to refresh my memory. It’ll be a nice item to add to my online portfolio to show future employers or clients what I can do for them.

Open Lab Hosted by the Web Club

One of the groups I am in at the West Bend Moraine Park Technical College campus is the Web Club. Most of the people in the club are people I have class with on a regular basis, and we end up spending a lot of time together.

It was the club’s idea to have an open lab where students in the Web Developer program could go to work on homework and get help if they needed it. I’m there almost every Monday to work on homework since the open lab is right before my evening class.

One day I was having trouble with one of my assignments. I just couldn’t get the JavaScript to work even though everything looked like it was coded (typed) correctly. Somebody from my class was also working in the lab. She took a look at my code and told me a few things to try to make it work. The problem ended up being an external link placement issue. I was very thankful for the help!

Open lab also gives us the opportunity to show each other projects we are working on and get feedback from others. Sometimes people find a really cool or funny website and share it with each other. One of the sites we were looking at one day was actor Jim Carrey’s site: http://www.jimcarrey.com/. It is pretty amazing.

The open lab is on Mondays from 3:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. in room S112 at the West Bend MPTC campus. Come join us for homework or for fun!

Making Cookies

If I said we were talking about cookies in class on Monday you’d probably think I was taking a cooking class in the culinary arts program here at Moraine Park Technical College. But actually the class I have on Monday nights is JavaScript.

JavaScript is a programming language that Web developers use to create more interactivity for the users (people who visit a Website). My instructor likes to explain JavaScript in terms of cooking. Using JavaScript is like adding spices to a Website for flavor. You can cook up a plain HTML page, but it can be bland without things like JavaScript.

In class, we learned how to create an Internet cookie. This kind of non-bakery cookie is something uploaded to a users computer when they visit a site to make it more personalized next time they visit that site. These could be things like preferences or what they had in their shopping cart. The HTML page we coded prompted the user to enter their favorite kind of cookie. By using JavaScript, we were able to take that information and use it in an alert box.

To see if it was saved onto the computer, we checked the browser to see if that information was saved in the cookie folder. It was! Last semester I learned what a cookie was and this semester I’m actually creating them!

After class we were all hungry for cookies - the bakery kind, of course.