Thursday, January 23, 2014

Jacob Ostreng, Quarter 2

This quarter I did a few projects. These projects were difficult to try to find information for and produce results.  The first project I did was with Benton Blank and involved trying to program a survey that looped and would just ask you the same question over and over again. The survey would ask "would you be willing to answer another question?" Then would record how many times you answered yes and end when you say no. This failed when Mr. Pethan gave us the idea to create a stats app that would be used for the tests and homework questions. To make this app Benton and I had to learn how to program in Django, a programming language. The only problem is that Mr. Pethan did not know how to program in this language, so we looked for a class online to try to teach us. When going through the instructions on how to program we learned how to make a blog. It took us a long time to be able to just make blog that can only be edited by one person with admin access. What I learned from this project is that it is extremely difficult to learn something you have very little background knowledge about when you do not have direct contact with someone who is an expert on the subject.

For a final project, Benton, Paul, and I are creating graphs and charts to help show how the growth of Byron will affect the tax rates with the new school levy. To do this we need to obtain property tax information on all of Byron and surrounding townships. The trouble with this is that we do not have direct access to this and have to obtain all this information through the county. As we all know the government does not do much very fast, so we have to postpone the continuation of our project till the first of February. When we get this information we will be able to create the graphs and models we want to. We will then be presenting it at two different informational sessions to let the school and public have a better understanding of how their taxes should change. This will include how the tax rate will go down with an increasing tax base.



This is the Olmsted County building we visited for data
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/OlmstedGovtCenter.JPG

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