Last week I was given work to better understand the physics of circuits in order to develop my understanding of how they work, so I am prepared when it comes to my practical project in the next few weeks. I looked at how electricity passes through different types of resistors on a simulation (on Tinkercad), and with real Arduinos. This work was in preparation for Ohms law, a law that describes how electricity passes through resistors. We explored this by testing how bright the LEDs are based on the different levels of resistor which was in use, as well as learning other things such as what the different colours on resistors mean. Although Ohm’s law is very simple, I found it very interesting, and its something that may be useful in my Physics class later in the year. I am feeling confident with my understanding of resistors and Ohm’s law, but there is another law I need to work though before I get the project: Kirchhoff’s Law. From what I understand prior to learning about it, Kirchhoff’s Law describes how voltages split into currents related to the initial voltage and the quantity of splits in the circuit.
I also had the Australian Math Trust CAT competition last week during my IT class, which was a surprise to me since I forgot what date it was supposed to be on. I found this challenge easier than I have in previous years, although I don’t know how I did yet (and won’t for a while). There were some very simple networking questions as well as some questions about ordering items in the least amount of moves, where I know how to do them, but I still struggle to work it out.
I also had the Lockheed Martin Advanced CodeQuest on the 30th of April, where my teammate and I attempted to work through as many of the questions as we could, which unfortunately was not many. With lots of procrastination, we looked at the samples questions 12 hours before the competition started. I found the logic in these samples manageable for me. It turns out the real competition was much more difficult. We were given test cases our code needed to pass for each question, but upon submission the code would be run against additional test cases which were hidden to us. This turned out to cause many problems as my code worked on the test cases provided for multiple questions, but failed against the hidden test cases for reasons I do not know.
Although I didn’t place in the CodeQuest, and I don’t know how I did in the CAT challenge, they were great fun and a good experience for my programming and logical thinking skills.