Scam Alert

 

 If you suspect a scam, keep these red flags in mind:

• The site asks for payment by wire or money order instead of Paypal or Credit Card. Always use a card if possible, because you can usually dispute a scam an receive a refund.

• The site uses a professional brand name, but also includes special characters or words rather than just the brand name. Case in point Pandorasukonline, which is now pulled. Pandora does not add phrases or words to their brand.

• Hyperlinks that go nowhere (broken links)

• Spelling errors, grammar errors, or unusual wording - a dead giveaway that the administrator's first language is not English. While that in itself is not a crime, keep in mind real retailers thoroughly vet their content professionally before publishing 

• While this may sound obvious, it needs to be said: If it sounds too good to be true, it normally is. If someone as in the computers example above offers you a Predator (c) gaming rig, even refurbished, for less than $1500 US, especially at $99, you are looking at a scam

-Dax

Update on the "Four in a Row" app progress

10/5/17

I had put the Connect Four clone project on hold while I was in school. I finished the first part of my dissertation, so now I have a couple of week break before returning to school, so I worked on the game project a bit more. I added some sounds, and tweeked the code to make it simpler to play.

The goal is for anyone to be able to pick up and play the game without any coaching, so simplicity is the order of the day. I made it easy to click any region on the screen and drop a token into place. Also I added some instructions to carry out if the program "senses" that there are four of the same colored tokens in a row. It was pretty easy, until I realized that the diagonal four-in-a-row routines would require a different approach then horizontal and vertical.

But, I got that problem solved with some elbow grease. If you know a little about programming and algorithm design, I used a "Brute Force" algorithm to check all possible cases for diagonal four-in-a-row success.  Basically, it asks, "Are there four in a row for Case 1?  No, Ok, how about Case 2..." and so on.  If you've never heard of brute force algorithms, it's basically what it sounds like. It checks each possible outcome, one at a time until it reaches all possible outcomes.

It's kind of a pain in the neck, but it works.

I'm 100% certain that a better programmer would have created an easier way, but I suppose that the good news is that part is done. Yay!

My Connect Four Clone Project

Project

A Connect Four clone (personal challenge)

Software Used

Clickteam Multimedia Fusion Developer

www.clickteam.com

Cool 3D

www.ulead.com

Screen Recorder

Blueberry Flashback Express (Free Edition)

www.blueberry.com

I have this vision of developing and marketing cross-platform games under my own label. They would be non-violent content and ministry tools for youth, and some retro-style simple games like the kind I enjoy.  I haven't had as much time to finish most of the projects because of all the fires I got going at the moment, but I sometimes sit down and try to build on an idea.

Recently I challenged myself to a personal project. I wanted to see if I could throw together a demo of Connect Four in one day.  I'll be transparent and say right away that I did not succeed, but that's okay.  The idea came up originally when I was in a statistics class, and thought about a Connect Four game board, and how many possible combinations there were to win. It's a nerd thing.

I drafted a quick mockup of a Four in a Row game board like the one in the video, which is not the official size of Connect Four, but a smaller version, and determined 68 ways to win, counting both red and black. Little disclaimer: I don't know if that's correct, but it's what I came up with.

I hadn't had time to play with the idea until my most recent class ended and I had a little free time, and decided to take up the challenge. I did not build the game demo in one day, but I built some rudimentary art and basic animations in a day. They are not up to commercial quality, but the point was just to see if I could do it. That was two days ago. 

Yesterday, I built the basic instructions into the play pieces. Where I got stuck is how to bring in a piece and drop it into the slot of your choosing. At first the method was to apply a drag-and-drop routine to the entity (the "checker" piece) and line it up with the slot and have it collide either with the bottom, or another piece.

The brick wall I kept hitting was that if the player didn't line the piece up just perfectly, then it would fall down haphazardly and might be barely visible. No problem, I thought, with my usual optimism. I'll just build barriers between each column, and make them real skinny and invisible to the player. I'd use instructions in the code that if the piece collides with the barrier, it would bounce off and keep it in line with the grid holes.

That didn't work, because the code took the collision to mean that the piece should just stop in place, and get stuck halfway down. Sometimes when programming a game with gravity and "platform" rules, you run into the same limitations you would in the physical world.

I settled on a different approach, which I fixed today. I have five buttons to pick from, and they are set up to spawn a piece which will fall perfectly in line. Not the most elegant solution, but it works for now. This is day three of my one-day challenge, lol  :-)

Should Taxpayers Continue to Give $2 Billion a Year to Fund Online Access in Public Schools?

By Dax Bradley

A University of Chicago study examined the impact of an E-Rate program and found that the number of poor schools going online had increased dramatically.  However, the study found no evidence that the program had any effect on students’ performance on the Stanford Achievement Test.  Should this be sufficient evidence to discontinue this program, which costs U.S. taxpayers roughly $2 billion per year?

The annual spending per student has seen a decline in recent years.  Balanced-budget rules have forced spending cuts to education in most states ("School Spending per Student Drops for Third Straight Year," 2016), which puts educators in the difficult position of determining how to spend the funds that are available.  The E-Rate program, provided through the Telecommunications Act of 1996, earmarked $2.25 billion to provide schools funds for upgrading their access to Internet resources (Reynolds, 2012, p. 325).

The problems unearthed by the press and by a Federal investigation highlight some very serious issues.  Among the discoveries outlined by House Representative James Greenwood (House Hearing: E-Rate Program: Waste, Fraud, and Abuse, 2004):

·         In Puerto Rico $28 million worth of improperly stored and stockpiled equipment

·         $58 million network equipment sitting unused

·         NEC allegedly rigged millions of US dollars in bids in several states

·         $101 million for setting up high-speed Internet yielded two computers per school, using dialup

·         $31 million paid for high-speed Internet access which went unused

·         Consultants paid high fees without doing any work, leaving schools with no equipment or with technology they had no idea how to implement

·         Government warehouses contained many pallets loaded with shrink-wrapped E-Rate computers paid for but never used

It should be noted that the Congressional Hearing contains over 100 pages, and the summary above depicts a small portion of what was discovered.  The E-Rate program was designed with the goal of providing students with improved technology and Internet access, which would be a helpful tool in providing an education, particularly today where students must be prepared to enter the market already saturated with computer technology.  However, if a tool is not being used, or is being mishandled irresponsibly, then it represents a colossal waste.  The issue is not with the program itself, but an apparent lack of oversight.

The funds were controlled by a collection of telecommunication company representatives which calls itself the Universal Service Administrative Company.  The Federal funds earmarked for education should be distributed to the state, not one company handling bids for the whole country.  With better oversight, the E-Rate funds would be used to improve low-income schools rather than “over-building” existing networks in higher-funded schools in areas such as Washington (Eggerton, 2017).

The fault is not strictly with USAC, however.  Funds were distributed according to requests filed by the school districts, which entailed some restrictions.  For example, schools were instructed that only one service provider could be used to build the network.  The Russell-Tyler-Ruthton School District was ordered to repay over $42,000 when it was discovered that multiple contracts were awarded to different providers (Isaackson,2017).  Additional guidance is needed for districts to understand precisely what the restrictions are, and how to properly utilize the federal dollars allotted to them.  Confusion, rather than greed could be just as likely the cause for some situations.  For example, Idaho schools stand to lose $2 million of E-Rate funds because they negotiated telecommunication contracts independent of USAC’s guidelines, voiding their agreement (Richert, 2016).

All is not lost, however.  The program should not be eliminated, but should have more accountability across the board.  It is insufficient to blame the telecoms for charging and not fulfilling the contracts, or to crucify school district heads who do not follow up on equipment that might have been shipped and never installed.  There should be greater attention to detail from conception to installation.  There has been improvement since the 2004 hearings.  According to the State of States Report published by the Education Superhighway, 77 percent of districts have access to high-speed internet, more than double the amount which achieved the target set by the FCC in 2013 (Schaffhauser,2016).

Does shuffling more money into schools automatically guarantee gains in performance?  While there has never been conclusive empirical evidence that directly connects spending to school performance (Turner, 2016), the better question should be about how the funds are spent.  Proponents of technology integration argue that students should be given the latest tools to learn from (King, 2012).  The point of emphasis here is that as long as technology integration is exactly that, a tool, and not the focus of the education, then it can be a highly effective resource and deserves proper funding.

Reference:

Reynolds, G. (2012). Ethics in information technology (4th ed.). Boston, MA: Course Technology, Cengage Learning.

Wheel of Scripture

Several years ago, I volunteered in Kids Ministry. We had to come up with original ways to keep them engaged and not too bored. Bored kids will eat you alive, even in church, lol! 

So anyway, I coded a basic "Wheel of Fortune" clone called "Wheel of Scripture". It helped them to memorize verses that had to do with our lesson. We had it up on the projector and made a kind of game show out of it.
Later my laptop crashed and I lost most of my projects. I found an old CD-Rom recently with the game on there and thought I'd share a screenshot of my cheesy game.

At the moment, there isn't much to it. The board is blank, save for the letter spaces. The game was pretty straight-forward: The players would simply guess a letter, and the operator, usually someone in the Media booth, would hit the key for that letter. If the letter was a correct guess, the game plays a *ding* sound and the letter appears in one of the blank spaces. If the guess is incorrect, it buzzes. The letter is crossed off at the bottom automatically, and the loop continues. 

There is no animation or music when the puzzle is solved. I may go back and finish the game at some point, and add that as a feature. Other ideas include:

-Adding scores

-Adding an actual wheel to spin, and include "Lose a Turn", "Vowel", "Spin Again" etc

-Adding more levels

-Adding the ability to "speak" the letter (language processing), so the game could work as a mobile game employing the microphone

This is one of those fun projects that kind of got abandoned. Game developers all have a huge graveyard of these, like little sketchbooks with incomplete drawings. Hopefully I'll be able to develop it into a fully playable game. Time will tell.