Week 5: midterm midterm midterm

This week was tough one. Three of my courses, CSC148, CSC165 and MAT137, have set the midterms in this week.

CSC148 was the first one among the three courses above. At first, I was in panic preparing for it, because this is the first midterm of this course, and I have no idea about what kind of questions will I face to in the test.

Usually, I use past tests a lot when preparing for exams. However, in this course, the past papers are not so helpful, because the previous classes share a different coverage of Test 1 from us, and the categories of questions are quite different as well. Hopefully, I still know that the exam is to test how well do I understand the stuff taught in this course. Then I started to review on the course notes, Lecture slides, handouts, and of course, the lab materials. It was tough though, since I didn't get all the document well organized. Well, the test was not so hard as imagined.

After the test, we've got a lecture about queue. I found lots of my friends found it difficult to distinguish between queue and stack, but I am doing it well. Just like the name of these two data structures, queues are like the queues in Starbucks, while, the person in the front leave the queue after taking orders, and the costumers join the queue from the end. The stacks are like like a stack of cards on the table, while people can only pick or add cards from the top.

By the way, I found out that as a computer science student, Bahen Information Center is my second home for me. ;)

Something about week 4 of my CSC148 Journy: Assignment and recursion

Last week was a busy one. In week 4, the first assignment of CSC148 due, and this has taught me a lot.

First, I realized the difference between CSC148 and CSC108. CSC108 is just real basic fundamental, while 148 is about computer ‘science’. In this assignment, we were asked to design a program of a simple game, subtract square. The real difficulty is, we were required to design 5 classes, to become a program. This really helps me to understand and make use of what I’ve been learn in the CSC148 lectures.

From the assignment, I realized several things about the course. First, team work is really important. At the beginning of the project, my partners and I divided the work into parts, working alone, and tried to combine the separated fragments. Then we found it was totally impossible. This is because we have a different view on the assignment, and have our own design on the program. It became really hard for use to assemble the individual pieces. After several trials, we finally started to design the program together, and work on it together. Well, it worked after all.

Another thing is that I found the drop in center real useful and helpful. With the help of the TA, we became confident about our design, and the progress was finally pushed forward.

In lectures, I learnt a new stuff called recursion, which is a process that a program calls itself. Prof. Heap showed us how to deal with complex lists with recursion. It was not hard to understand, but I still need some time to get through it.