Throughout the year, I’ve learned a couple different languages. I was a little nervous at the beginning, because I had very little experience, but it has actually become one of my favorite classes. I’ve learned HTML and CSS to code this very website, and Java to solve some interesting problems. Please, take a look at some of them below.
Part of why I love Computer Science is because of just how many solutions there can be to a problem. You don’t need THE answer, you just need AN answer. In this particular question, I had to count the seperate vowels in a given sentence. It’s not the coolest program, but after talking to a couple friends about what they did, I found that I had a really wacky solution. I like how this problem showed me that there really are many answers to one problem in Computer Science.
Did you know that there is actually a pretty intricate algorithm that banks use to tell whether or not a credit card number is valid? It’s this thing called “Luhn’s Algorithm,” you can read a more in-depth description elsewhere, but it essentially checks if a sequence of numbers fit a certain algorithm. I had to write a script that would go through the steps and check whether or not a credit card is valid. If it wasn’t, I would have to provide a change to the last digit (called the check digit) to make the number valid.
Apps for Good is a UK based organization that challenges students to make an app to do something... good. After quite a bit of brainstorming with my group (Palak Yadav, Samhitha Bodangi, and me), we came up with the idea for HackStreet, a web-app designed to aid users in finding a home that fits their needs. We found that other current websites that do this, like Zillow, have great information about each individual house, but don't really help in the decision making process. We ended up creating a web based app that allows the user to create a list of favorite houses, and sort that list based on their individual needs. My group split up the work, so I ended up mainly making the logic behind the decision matrix. We never got to deploying the website, but we do plan on reaching out to organizations who could potential use our website as a backbone. You can view our poster below!