First!

There's a first for everything.

And for a computer science course, this will be my second.  My first computer science course was back in high school however the program we used was Alice and it involved only drag and drop commands.  I was excited to take this course knowing it would involve "coding" for the most part, and that it wouldn't be as intensive as CSC108 might be.  For the most part, I have been satisfied with the level of programming that the course has introduced to me together with a little history along the way.  It's safe to say this has been my first, closest thing to computer programming that I've done but perhaps not the last.

From Week 1 to Week 8

It's now the end of week 8 and time has really flown by for this course and this semester in general.  For the first two thirds of the semester, I have found the level of programming to be very straightforward and "kind".  The material has been easy to absorb and concepts and functions have been easy to grasp.  I found that the video tutorials for Dr. Racket were brief and to the point, and paused every so often so that I could play around with the programming tools myself.  At first, I would replicate the functions from the video, but then I would branch out from the tasks and try to combine as many of the functions in the video as possible, learning from errors when they arise.  This has proven to be an effective learning method for me as I have had much success with the quizzes and the recent term test. 

For the term test, I know that my weakest point going in would be the written section, with anything to do with the history of computers since I had missed a couple of classes.  I was however able to catch up and read the weekly summaries and postings which included some notes of what was covered in class.  Luckily, the main focus of the test was on writing some commands which I was able to do well.

Some notable related material (MAT246):

Last semester, I had taken a course on abstract mathematics which covered the Euclidean Algorithm, and algorithm that Professor Baumgartner had mentioned in one of the early lectures.  Following the algorithm would allow the user to find the greatest common divisor of two numbers.  However, I noticed that the algorithm he used in class involved a slightly different approach compared to the algorithm presented in my previous course.  This highlighted the fact that there can be many different algorithms or paths to the same answer, and as pointed out in the first question of the first term test, time efficiency is the main deciding factor to determine which algorithm is favored.

Difficulties (not so much):

There really haven't been many difficulties in this course, if any at all.  The Wikipedia contribution assignment has taken some time to learn the technicalities of creating a proper post or edit which I unfortunately left out in part 1.  I will update my thoughts on part 2 when finished.  Other than that, I guess waking up early for a 9am morning lecture has been pretty tough.

Looking forward to...

- Next week's first programming challenge "Sneeze"