This is a dud account fyi
The only reason I'm writing this is because I am this 🤏 close to quitting on life and need to point my anger somewhere else.
So I'm a senior in high school. I planned out my courses this year where I'd have it really easy and I'd get to enjoy my final year of school before finally going off to college. The only really difficult class I had this year, AP comp sci principles, was also the class I was looking forward to taking the most.
This year I actually, should've, known what I was doing. I had learned the basics of python from the course I took last year and in my AP class this year I learnt a whole new language, JavaScript. This whole year I've been struggling to get above a 76% in the class. I know I can do better. I know the material. I know what I'm doing. But I keep messing up and losing points on small things... My teacher has literally taken 0.1 points off a 1 point exit ticket because I forgot to add a semicolon. I've given up on getting a "B" in the class. But my new goal, and what this post is about, was to at least ace the exam and performance task.
The AP comp sci principles exam is in two parts. The first part is your standard exam. Answer like 50 questions in the given amount of time. Simple. That's worth 70% of your final grade. The second part of the exam is something called the "Create performance task". This is something where we as students are tasked with creating any program, it can literally be whatever we want, as long as it contains the following conditions:
- an if statement
- a list/array
- a function that is made by us
- a for loop that does something meaningful with or within the function
For any non technical folks who have no idea what I just said there's a glossary at the bottom if you're curious. Anyway, this part of the exam is worth 30% of my grade and is due on the 30th of this month. I don't know why, I guess maybe I felt like I had something to prove to myself, but I thought I could make a game. It's not even a real game. It's a fucking character sheet with a built in pic crew basically. Not only did I over estimate my abilities but I also did this in the dumbest way possible. I decided to code it in Python instead of JavaScript because Python is what I was used to. This gave me SO many issues because my teacher started acting weird (I think he got offended by me choosing to use a different language), then my school fucking blocked our python sandbox environment that we use. So I couldn't work on my project using my school laptop anymore. Then, I also stubbornly thought it would be easier to draw all the images myself so I wouldn't have to bother with giving credit to other creators for using their assets (also because I was scared the AP people would think less of me for using a bunch of photos off the Internet). Yeah, I know. It was fucking stupid. I probably should have just taken 50 or something assets from gatcha life and then called it a day. But I decided that this was the smartest thing to do. Why? Because I'm stupid, stubborn, and wanted my program to look pretty. I did this to myself and I can't even cry about it.
What pisses me off most about my stupid drawings Is i wouldn't have even needed to waste my time drawing all of them if I had just written the swap graphic function and tested it before I started. But no. I spent this whole month planning around the idea that I would have a character customization mode in this program. Never actually writing the code for it, and then when I finally go to write the functions for switching graphics in character customization mode.... It doesn't work. Yeah the program just straight up breaks and doesn't work. I'm starting to believe it's not possible. I have been agonizing over this for 3 days now. I have checked as many sources as Google can physically give me on this subject, I have shown my dad, my teacher, God damn ChatGPT AND NO ONE KNOWS WHY ITS NOT WORKING!!!! I am the last person in my class who is still on the programming portion on the performance task. I have tried working out a different solution over and over and over again. I was DREAMING about how to fix this. But there is no solution. There is nothing wrong with the way the code is written. Well, obviously there is. But for the life of me I can't find it. I just can't see why it's not working...
I do have a backup plan. One that I tested earlier today and thankfully that one is working so I could just turn it in like that. But I'm just so mad at myself. I could have been done 3 weeks ago if I had just tested out these methods with placeholder images to see if it works. But I didn't. I wasted an entire month because I thought I was smart enough to fix any issues that come my way. Like damnit I kept working on this even after getting into a car crash last Friday because I wanted this to work so badly that I didn't care how tired and gross I felt. I just wanted to know that I was doing something right. But none of that effort paid off to anything. In the end there wasn't even a point to all that effort I put into this. Because if I had just been a little smarter about how I tested things out, I'd have been done several weeks ago. I am a fucking idiot. I hate life a lot right now.
TLDR: I stubbornly thought I could fix any issue that came my way and spent an entire month making custom graphic assets before testing if my code would actually fucking work. When I would have been done 3 weeks ago if I had just tested my code with placeholders before making all those assets.
Glossary
List/array --- a method used for organizing a group of items
If statement --- a command that only works if the conditions inside it are true. (EX: if "it's sunny outside" Then "write your code here")
Function --- the best way I can explain this is that it's defining a new word but also giving that word actions to go along with it.
For loop --- basically an if statement but you repeat it a specific amount of times.