Computers and Decision Making



BASIC (VISUAL BASIC)

Summer 1998

810:030 section 01

Wright 105 (2:30–3:30 MTTh)

Wright 112 (2:30–4:40 W)

Mark Jacobson Home phone: (319) 354-5725

Office: Wright 323 UNI email address on Cobra: jacobson@cobra.uni.edu

Office phone: 273-7172 Email address on chaos: jacobson@s.uni.edu

Office hours: 12–1:30 Mon–Thu Computer Science department phone: 273-2618

and by appointment URL:

Check the PC lab (WRT 112) and the Sun lab (WRT 339).

Also check 323 office door for goto and/or when back notes.

Summer teaching schedule: 9:50 until noon Monday through Friday

2:30 until 3:30 Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday

2:30 until 4:40 on Wednesday

Textbook: Microsoft Visual Basic 5.0 for Windows by Michael Ekedahl and William Newman

Grading on exams, homework and quizzes.

1. There will be six short quizzes. Each quiz will take 10 to 15 or 20 minutes of our class time. Each quiz will be worth around 4 or 5 % of your grade. The six-quiz total in points will be about 30 % of your grade for the course. The quiz dates will be June 18th, June 25th, July 2nd, July 9th, July 16th and July 23rd. The first quiz is Thursday, June 18th. Note that there is a quiz every Thursday, except for the first and last weeks of class.

1. The final exam will count 30 % of your grade. It will be held on Thursday, July 30th..

1. The laboratory sessions and class attendance will count for 15 % of your grade. There will often be a lab sheet to turn in at the end of lab and/or at the start of the lab on Wednesdays. There will sometimes be a very short lab quiz during the lab, allowing you to use the computer and Visual Basic or your book and notes or a “cheat sheet”.

1. The homework assignments will be worth 25 % of the total grade. Homework will be a mixture of Visual Basic programming assignments and the more traditional paper and pencil type of questions.

Course objectives:

Learn the basic principles of programming and problem solving. Ghostbusters metaphor and computer problem solving.

Understand the concept of object-oriented and event-driven programming as it applies to Visual Basic.

Be an effective user of an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) user interface.

Learn the fundamentals of writing Visual Basic code.

Learn how to create dialog boxes and design a user interface. Becoming a more effective user of GUI (Graphical User Interface) applications. Be able to produce menus, windows, dialog boxes, command buttons. hot keys, etc.

Learn how to create simple animations using Visual Basic. Understand graphics concepts..

Develop a much deeper understanding of how Windows 95 and Windows NT programs work. Become a more effective user of Windows software and applications by producing simple Windows programs using Visual Basic.

Distinguish between high-level languages (hll), assembly language (al) and machine language (ml). Distributing your compiled Visual Basic application.

Understand the power of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and macros in the context of Microsoft Office programs. Recording and modifying macros. Looking at the objects of Excel or Word.

Learn what the steps of game development are in Visual Basic. Components of a simple example game such as keeping score, randomness, sprites, graphics, increasing difficulty, etc.

Understand how Visual Basic is used in conjunction with web pages. VBScript language is a subset of VBA which is a subset of Visual Basic. Using VBScript to add some pizzazz to a web page.

Miscellaneous topics:

12. Any student who requires some modification of seating, testing, or other class requirements should speak with the instructor at the beginning of the semester.

13. I generally check my electronic mail every day of the week, often several times per day. If you are sending email from your chaos account or from your COBRA or VIPER account, just use jacobson as the To: address.

14. When sending email, sign with your first name at the end of the note. It makes it much easier to reply because those COBRA student ids only show your first initial and the first six characters of your last name. Later on we will do the “SET PERSONAL_NAME” mail command. I will address you by your first name when answering your note. You should generally always start email notes by using the person’s name, so start your notes with “Hi Mark” or “Mark” or “Hello Mark” and end them with your first name or first and last name, so I can answer you by name.

15. Feel free to leave early for an appointment or whatever as that is never a problem but it is always nice to be told before class starts.

16. The class 810:022 section 90 is taught the 2nd four weeks and is closely related to this class. It is entitled Microcomputer Applications and Systems Integration. A large part of that class is the study of VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) and recording and writing macros for Excel and Word and PowerPoint and Access).

17. The four classes 810:021, 810:022, 810:023 and 810:030 taken at UNI give you microcomputer certification from the computer science department. 810:023 (Microcomputer Systems) is offered next spring. 810:030 (Visual Basic) is offered every semester.

18. This class (Visual Basic) has no prerequisites. You do not need to have any previous computer experience or computer programming courses to take this class.

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