Second MUF Class Held

The second of Joshua Farstrike’s continuing series of Introduction to MUF classes was held Saturday at the SpinDizzy Center of Arts and Science. Airborn, skunk; Claude, LOLcat; Jaxen, fox; Nyni, My Little Pony; BunnyHugger, devilbunny; and Chitter, squirrel, were in attendance.  (A log of the second MUF class, provided by and from the perspective of Claude, is available.)

Class started with a presentation of projects from the previous week. The homework assignment was to create a program that would shoot a pie at someone with a 33% chance of hitting. BunnyHugger presented hers first, but had chosen instead to make a “stern looker” with the same parameters. She demonstrated by throwing “stern moral looks” around the room. Claude showed his pie thrower next; it had the added twist of including messages for either barely missing or missing by a lot, in addition to the hit message. Jaxen went last, showing a more sophisticated program that made use of random seeds and also included multiple failure messages. Joshua praised all the students for their work, and explained that differences between the ways that the students chose to solve the homework should be regarded as a matter of style rather than superiority or inferiority.

The lesson for the day covered several topics. First Joshua discussed the MUCK’s database item structure; after this part of the lesson, BunnyHugger had to leave in order to prepare for her important Easter duties. The remaining students went on to learn about the use of try/catch to avoid program crashes, and how to work with arrays. Finally, Joshua gave a homework assignment: a MUF version of Twitter, which he described as “a program that you can send ‘update messages’ of 160 characters maximum to other players who have subscribed to you instantly, and which will be stored on you for later review.”