Lesson 10, 6/4/17

      This lesson is the second lesson of technopreneurship and is held in our DnT lab. The speaker today addressed on how we should be innovative when thinking of ideas. We first started off with a typical "How to join nine dots with 4 lines", before reducing the number of line to 1 line. This shows me how innovation should look like and that the problem with most people is that they would like to assume certain conditions in their mind, and this will prevent them from thinking of innovative ideas to solve the problems. Not only so, the speaker also talked about surveying the customer before coming out with the solution to solve the problem. Sometimes the customers population is too insignificant for us to solve the solution and we can never be a successful entrepreneur by solving these problems. Through this course, I have a greater insight on how to become a successful entrepreneur as well as learning from the reason why some entrepreneurs have failed in the past. After this, we went back to the iCode lab and our teacher remind us again about the respective roles that we need to undertake as well as do a mock-up of how the web application would look like. This is so as to ensure that we are on the right track and that we do not delay our project for too long.

Lesson 9, 30/3/17

          This lesson is a bit different from the previous lessons as it is being held at the Nanyang Technopreneurship Centre and it is our first CID trip out of school, conducted by external speaker. At first, I dreaded to go to the course and would prefer to stay in school to continue learning about Python, but after hearing that the course cost nearly $2000 per lesson, I have decided to go there with an open-mind to see what i can learn from the course. Our course speaker is Mr Roderick Chia. He is a serial entrepreneur and is a 6 time Tan Kah Kee Young Inventor's award winner. However, he say that all these awards do not path his success today and it is actually the failures that help him do so. He learnt it the hard way that not all problems are worth solving. Some of the problems in the market can be easily avoided or there is already another invention that is solving the current problem. The main takeaways I have for this course is that we need to be able to predict the future problems and design something which solves this problem. Hence, when the problem really occurs, we are well ahead of others and that is how we can be successful in life. I was very inspired by this course and my impression of this course have changed ever since.

Lesson 8, 23/3/17

            In this lesson, the teacher looked through our proposal and give us comments on how we can improve our proposal. Through this short session with our teacher mentor, I realised that there are some parts of the proposal that was not being addressed, which in this case is that we never actually provided real data to back-up our claim that the students are not having enough time for their breaks, and what we have done is just assumption. I also fully understand that a proposal without the intended customers in mind is not a good proposal at all and what we should have done is to survey the student cohort instead, before doing up the proposal. This also teaches me how to look out for a good proposal and this will be useful for my future projects. After this short evaluation session, we proceeded to normal lesson.
               We learnt about lists, object oriented programming as well as databases. We were also given Yr 5 notes on databases to study at home. This is by far the most content that we have covered in one lesson, and we were released a little bit later than usual. All these extra information is necessary as will soon be embarking on a course on Technopreneurship and will have lesser time on computing lessons itself. 

Lesson 7, 2/3/17

              This lesson was also spent on mainly doing up the proposal itself. The teachers also provided guidance on how certain projects could be carried out, for example in our project, we would need to use HTML and CSS to design a front-end webpage, while the functions of the page itself will need to be done by Python codes. When the students order the food, their orders will also need to be placed in a database known as SQlite for the stall owners to retrieve it and process the orders. From this lesson, I realise that this project is actually very complicated and definitely cannot be done by one person and thus, we would need to work together as a group and each of us take up a different role, and when combined together, form a successful web application. This also serves as a wake up call for me to start learning what is needed to carry out this project in order to not burden my teammates. I also realise how lucky I am to have a teammate who have more experience in computing to guide me along and give me instructions on what to do when I am unclear of some procedures.

Lesson 6, 23/2/17

           This lesson is mainly spent on generating a proposal in our own groups. We were tasked to do a proposal on a web application that we would like to implement. The teachers also explained what are the factors to consider when doing a web application, such as the front-end development and back-end development, as well as the full stack foundation which is in charge of combining the front-end and back-end. Suddenly, everything I have thought about building a web application have changed. It is definitely harder than I expected as there are simply to many factors to be considered in order to build a web application from scratch. During the lesson itself, we were given time to discuss and decide on a project we are going to implement, and we have decided to come up with a RVHS food ordering system. In look of the short recess and lunch breaks that we have, we have decided to do an online web application for student to order their food and only need to collect their food during their respective rest time, hence allowing them more time to eat. Through this proposal, I have learnt the need to put into use what we have learnt to help improve the school life and in this case, if our project works out well, we may be the very first school in Singapore to implement this kind of ordering system. This makes me feel extremely excited for the project itself.

Lesson 5, 9/2/17

           In this lesson, we were given time to complete as well as discuss the ten practice questions that were given to us the previous lesson. When the teacher was going through the len question, I felt that I could not catch up with him and could not understand some of the explanations. However, I did not stop and clarify my doubts with him as I thought that the rest of the class understood the question except for me, but then the actual fact in the end is that most of the people in the class are also unclear of the len question and after reflecting, I felt that it was very stupid of me to voice out and clarify my doubts as it will not benefit me and it is not the correct attitude that I should have. Thus, after this incident, I have decided to not be scared of speaking up and clear all my doubts when possible. After that, we proceeded to learn about while loop and for loop. This two loops are used to continue a certain function until a specific criteria is met. I find this function very fun as it can actually continue going on and on without stopping. At the end of this lesson, I also learnt that there are lots of  various functions in Python and we should never be complacent and think that we have finished learning everything in Python, when in fact, we have only just covered the basics. Thus, I cannot wait to explore other functions in Python.

Lesson 4, 2/2/17

          For this lesson, we learnt about the range and len function. To me, I feel that it is a very complicated function as it requires a lot of logical flow in your mind. For the range function, I feel that it is an extremely useful function in Python, as it can help you to eliminate the possibilities that you do not want and only pick up those that you want. However, for the len function, I do not quite understand it as the thought process for it is too great for me. This motivates me to go online to search for more information on the len function, but after reading the tutorials, I still do not quite understand and hope that the teachers can revisit this function again. Next, we were given a file containing ten practice questions for all the functions we have learnt for the past few lessons. When I first attempted the questions, I felt that it was extremely hard as some questions require combination of several functions, but after the guidance by our teacher, I started to get the hang out of it, and completed nearly all the questions. When I meet some of the questions which I do not understand, I have learnt that Google is my best friend, and hence will proceed to Google to do a thorough research on them, and hence, I also learnt that in order to progress in computing, we will need to constantly do online research by ourselves and should not slack off.