A Cinderella Story

March Madness earned its name for a reason, for all the chaos that happens in the NCAA Men's National Championship Tournament. Usually there are several upsets in the second round of the tournament, an 11 seed upsetting a 6 seed or a 5 seed falling to a 12 seed, but this season for the first time in over 30 years two teams lower than a 5 seed have made it into the Final Four. 11 seed Virginia Common Wealth (VCU) is the only team to have won five games to make it to the semi-finals and will face Butler, an 8 seed, who is the first non-Big 6 conference to have made it to the Final Four in back-to-back years. Only one of these Cinderella teams will be able to make it to the National Championship game where they will face off against wither Kentucky or Connecticut. Now that my bracket has been destroyed because of the many upsets this year, I find myself cheering for VCU, who I picked to beat Georgetown and Purdue, but will this Cinderella story really have a happy ending?

-jag13

19th Reflection

This past week in computer science we got new computers. Now you might think that it's a good thing to get new computers to work on, and it still might turn out that way, but Friday turned out terrible. Instead of being able to turn in my labs and work on the current ones, the H drive crashed and hindered my work. Having no work may seem like it would be a relief, but my computer ran slow at everything, whether it was opening word documents or trying to attach files to an email. Hopefully we can fix the problem and get these new computers to do what they were made for, to make things easier.

-jag13

18th Reflection

Before Spring Break we worked on using booleans in Python. A boolean, simply put, is a true or false statement. For example, if we entered 2 >= 1 the program would return 'True' because the statement was correct. The results of a boolean statement can be predicted by using tables and using the stated functions to figure out what is true and what is false. Booleans are commonly used with loops, so that the loops stops once the boolean is no longer true. An example of this would be ' while x==2:'. If x was equal to two then the loop would run. Booleans are also used in if statements the same way. I found booleans to be fairly simple due to the fact that the are basically true or false answers meaning the program will run one possibility or another.

-jag13

Spring Break

I have never been more thankful for Spring Break than this year. With the work load from LASA and the soccer season coming to an end it has been stressful to say the least. Over the break I have played basketball quite a bit and have gone out with friends, but the best part has been getting my body well rested again. I have been able to sleep in late and not have to worry about getting up early for school or stay late for soccer practice. I haven't  had to worry about homework either (for the most part) and having that stress relieved has made my life much easier. Now that break is almost over though I have summer to look forward to, that is until junior year starts.

-jag13

Law and Order

Yesterday in English class I submitted my choices for electives for my junior year here at LASA. Because there will be no required signature courses to take and I will be finished with my language credits, I got to choose electives for half my classes. During freshmen and sophomore year I have been working at getting my required credits done (health, speech, etc.) so that I could take more classes that appeal to me. Those classes primarily deal with law. After taking Mock Trial for my speech credit I discovered the interest I had in law and as a result have decided to take several history based electives, including Contemporary Issues, Model UN, Facing History, and Constitutional Law. Hopefully I will be as interested in these classes as I was in Mock Trial and will be able to have an enjoyable junior year.

-jag13

17th Reflection

Last week we worked on labs involving "while" and "for i in range (x)" loops. The labs were very easy and simple for once because of the setup. The lab descriptions were like the ones we did for Jeroo, Scratch, and Alice, and the code was mostly complete. This made the labs very easy to understand and using the loops made the code short and sweet. The loops made writing code much easier and efficient, but the format of the labs is what made it so easy to understand.

-jag13