Thoughts of Tim

Cellular Automaton Program

A cellular automaton is a cell on a grid that changes states based on the states of itself and its neighboring cells. The next state is found by looking at the current state of the current cell and its neighbors and then applying rules to determine the next state of the cell. Once the next [...]

AP Chemistry Lab Manual

As an AP Chemistry teacher, one of the requirements for class is that we do several laboratory experiments throughout the year. For this school year, I have been focusing on covering material from the text book and fitting in experiments when possible. Now that I have almost made it through my first school year here, I have [...]

Mailing List Manager (Update)

Introduction Over the past few weeks, I have been working on creating a program that will send an e-mail to a list of e-mail addresses. There are programs/systems that already do this, but all of the ones that I found either required that recipients opt-in for the e-mails, required that you pay before you use [...]

Chaotic Pendulum Program

About I created the chaotic pendulum program to visually show qualities of a chaotic system and show the differences between a non-chaotic system (simple pendulum) and a chaotic system (chaotic pendulum). Simple Pendulum A simple pendulum consists of a mass on a rod. The mass is attached to one end of the rod and the [...]

Final Quarter

Here at Dakar Academy, the school year is divided into four terms. Currently, we are in the last of the four terms. Spring break began three weeks ago and lasted for two weeks. During that time, I was able to do a lot of preparation for this last term. In algebra, we are going over [...]

Diffusion Limited Aggregation Program

About This program simulates growth that can be found in nature. The growth that is simulated can be used to describe, to an extent, how snowflakes are formed, how dirt particles interact to form larger pieces of dust and how precipitates in chemical reactions are formed. Process The diffusion limited aggregation pattern is created by first fixing [...]

Mailing List Manager

I currently working on programming a mailing list manager. After looking around for existing options, I couldn’t find any programs I liked because they either forced a user to confirm their e-mail address before it would start sending e-mails to it, cost money or required mail server on the computer I was using. As a [...]

Projectile Motion Program

About While I was in college, I created a program that used the Euler method to calculate the path a projectile takes. The advantage of using the Euler method for calculating the path of a projectile is that calculations can easily be updated to take into account complex factors, such as air resistance, spin, and [...]