So, they’re having a hard time discerning exactly how I did what I did in class. Much of how you do things in Excel, the process, is invisible from watching the screen, e.g., shift-clicking to select a range. Excel functions are hidden, invisible when you look at a spreadsheet until you click on the right cell. Based on the questions I’m getting already, it’s challenging for the students. My students are working on this assignment this week, and I’ll let you know how it goes. Fortunately, we figured it out, but I got a new appreciation of how non-portable the edge of Excel functions can be. Things that I had worked out in Windows Excel failed or worked differently when doing a live coding session in MacOS Excel (e.g., the FREQUENCY function worked differently, or not at all - hard to tell). I lectured on Excel on Thursday in support of this assignment, and it was rough. I’ve come up with a homework assignment where students do Media Computation using unusual Excel formulas (e.g., using IF, AND, and COUNTIF). So I asked them at the start of class: What did they want to learn about Office applications? Several students said that they’d like to learn to use formulas in interesting ways in Excel. And I bet that most of my students know a lot about Office applications already. Normally, CS1315 (the course I’m teaching) includes labs on Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, but there’s no sense of “lab” in these compressed courses. I’m using this tool in the Media Computation course that I’m teaching this summer. More importantly, it exposes the data abstractions in picture files (turning JPEGs into columns of x,y and RGB), and makes the lower level data malleable. It allows us to do image manipulations via spreadsheet tools like Excel. I mentioned awhile ago that some undergraduates built for me a new tool for converting from images to spreadsheets, and back again. Pixel Spreadsheet in a Media Computation class: Exposing data abstraction with Excel
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