Final exam study guide

1. Encrypting string data was an exercise used as an assignment in BASIC back in spring of 1984 in Survey of Computing. VISUAL BASIC did not yet exist. GUIs existing, but only in research labs. See your handout from last week. This program you worked on in small groups. It is a good review of For loops, nested loops, the concatenate operator, the Len and the Mid string functions.

2. ListBox movie rental questions. As you recall, this program asks you to look at the screen snapshot of the running application along with the immediate window and surmise what movies have been rented or' deleted and in what order. You also see the code for the Form_Load event, which initially filled the movie ListBox control.

3. Here is a more challenging movie rental questions page from the summer 99 final exam.

4. Meteor game questions. If you look at the Meteor Game handouts before spending half an hour trying to answer these questions, you will get very little benefit from the sample test questions.

5. Past quiz and exam questions. There are 21 practice questions to try out.

6. There will be some True/False, Multiple Choice, and fill in the blank questions over the waggle dancing bees and Ghostbuster's problem solving handouts and lectures. The lessons on phases or stages of the problem solving process are very important.
   • Ghostbuster's movie metaphor thoughts
   • Waggle dancing bees, searching for solutions, planning, mobilizing past knowledge. Biction. To bee a successful problem solver/programmer, get up on the dance floor and dance.

7. Option Explicity, Static, Dim, MsgBox, InputBox, ScrambleIt function and string manipulation.

8. Questions taken from page 55, 73, 95, 144, 165, 180, 181, 195, 243, 244, 265, 302, 317, 318 of the textbook. One or more from each of these pages.

26. What does the following statement do?  Explain carefully.

                              PSet (100, 200), RGB(0, 0, 255)

27. Carefully describe what the very 1st thing is that the following Visual Basic
    statement does or causes the computer CPU to do or perform?  (The statement
    consists of 5 different steps).
                                            whichPt = Int(Rnd() * 3 + 1)

28. What is the 2nd action that occurs during the CPU's execution of the above
    Visual Basic statement?  Describe it carefully and precisely.

29. What are the main two properties of a Timer control that a programmer needs
    to use the most often?

30. Write the event procedure for a Timer named Timer1 so that it changes the
    lblPanthers background color to a randomly chosen new color (one of 16 million)
    every 1/2 second.  Write the entire event procedure, not just the statements
    that would go inside of it.

31. Write a command button event for the button called cmdPauseResume so that it
    would cause the Timer1 to stop if it was going and to start again (RESUME) if
    it was paused.  The message on your command button should say Pause if the
    color changing is running and it should say Resume if it is currently paused.
    (This exercise relates to item 30, shown above here).

32. What is biction?  Why would biction be very important in doing well on question
    31 above, in a test situation?  What does biction have to do with the 
    stages and phases of problem solving?  What does it have to do with listening.

33. What does the waggle dancing of bees have to do with the programming and
    problem solving process?

34. Why is "Resist the urge to code" one of the most important proverbs for
    programmers?  Explain.