Golf!

This semester I particpated in Professor Gerdes' Software Design course. We used Visual Studio 2010 to learn the Visual Basic coding language. Visual Basic (VB) is an object oriented programming language that is event driven.

One of the class assignments was to work in groups of three to develop a program. My group members with Brittany Greene and Deshanna Hayden, two IIT majors I had never met before. A few project ideas were suggested but Professor Gerdes left the assignment open for new ideas. The only special requirements were that the program incorporate a database and a dynamic web page. Our team met to decide on what to do for the project and I suggested a card game that I learned during college called Golf. We all agreed that the project sounded exciting and we drew up a proposal.

I was in charge of the logic behind the game. I had no previous knowledge of creating a card game and this was way beyond the complexity of small assignments we had completed in class. Using the class textbook and several helpful websites I completed the game itself in just under 20 hours and a little more that 600 lines of code. We decided to incorporate a database by storing the player's names and scores. Brittany designed a database using Microsoft Access that could hold the correct fields, then a few lines of code that would take values (player's names and scores) created during the game and store them in the correct fields. Then I created a feature that would write dynamic HTML code based on the database fields to display it all in a 'Recent Scores' table. Deshanna helped with the graphical design and even created a professional looking splash screen. There is also a tutorial describing the rules to the game.

Having no experience in VB before this semester this was definitely a challenging project that I am proud to have accomplished. Our class will be presenting our projects on Tuesday, December 4th.

Marketing Using Social Media

Social media is described as media for social interaction. Most times it involves easily accessible and highly scalable publishing methods. Common tools we see today are Twitter, Facebook and blogs. Most of these tools are all free to use, which undoubtedly helps them boast their large user numbers.

In recent years, businesses have turned to social media to reach out in marketing campaigns to the public. It is becoming a very common practice for marketing campaigns to expand into the growing world of social connectivity. Companies interacting with social media can often times build brand recognition and dedication as users 'like' pages and retweet relevant news. Campaigns of this kind are often times successful from the point of view of the company that creates them. They are highly accessible to the public, easy to use and low cost. As new forms of social media is created opportunity for marketing campaigns expands also.

So how should we use this information in order to better our marketing plan using social media? Free is good. New is good. Stay on top of the trending types of social media and take advantage of them. Don't expect results beyond what the tool is actually capable of. Be happy with an effective form of advertising that is being provided to you fairly inexpensively.