WORK O' THE DAY: 

We discussed the idea of 'triaging' a tricky coding program yesterday.

Recall that we need to:

• Check to see if there is a nasty bit of coding lurking somewhere in the assignment

  • If so, determine if that is worth your time to investigate further

  • If so, attack that nasty bit first

• Check the 'width and breadth' of the assignment. Are there lots of little things that together make up a lot of the assignment?

  • If so, attack those little things right away

  • If no, then work on the bigger pieces

For practice today, I want you to work with your team to 'triage' a tricky coding problem that I will present to you momentarily.

Before you do that, I'm going to ask that you do something I usually tell you NOT to do, which is to bring up App Lab, and hunt and click to help you triage the problem WHILE YOU ARE TALKING with your team.

Here's the nasty little coding snippet:

Let's say you were in a testing situation and I told you to create a new program in App Lab that had two combo boxes on the screen:

• Combo Box #1 listed 3 colors: Red, Blue, Green
• Combo box #2 is empty.

Your task is such that you have to make it so that:

When the user selects the Red option in the first combo box that the second combo box is populated with 4 different 'flavors' of red (numerically) that are different numbers than either Green or Blue values

When the user selects the Blue option in the first combo box that the second combo box is populated with 4 different 'flavors' of blue that are different numbers than either Red or Green values.

When the user selects the Glue option in the first combo box that the second combo box is populated with 4 different 'flavors' of blue that are different numbers than either Red or Blue values

 

The trick here is NOT to start writing code but to get an idea how to proceed and THEN go see if the tools to carry that out are available in App Lab (hint: They are!)