Week 2 - A One Day Week

Hey again,

Well the week was, as usual, a full 7 days, but due to unforeseen weather changes this class only met once. On Wednesday the proctor for the class, Alex Coomans, gave a lecture on getting started with git. We had a quiz at the start of class over the reading, which I found particularly straight forward having already read the two articles assigned to us in previous classes. Then with little time to spare at the end of the class we went over some of the Collatz changes that Dr. Downing made. He changed some of the starter source code for us from Python 2.7 to Python 3.

Because the class time this week was so short, there is not much to report on for the actual class experience. I think this may have put us back on schedule a bit as far as understanding how to improve the performance of our Collatz program. Our original schedule had us discussing caches on Friday, the day the school was closed due to inclement weather.

Outside of this, we have a discussion board for the class, Piazza, which gives us a forum to ask each other questions over the material, share what we know, and get helpful input from the TAs and Downing himself. He has this week been very forthcoming with his advice to us, imploring us to post on Piazza, and attend the weekly study sessions. I have already found a post there from a classmate about a feature of Python that is pretty cool.

There are two scheduled study sessions a week on Tuesday and Wednesday that we can attend in the evening to study for the class and help out our classmates with anything they may be uneasy on. The sessions are run by the TAs and proctor, all of whom have experience with the class structure and can be helpful with both the class assignments, as well as any general questions. And, this is time outside of their regular office hours. Sadly, however, I have not attended any of the sessions thus far. I have been easing into my new school/work/life schedule slowly, and I hope to be able to schedule myself to get to at least one a week. I know that these sessions can be immensely helpful with studying for the exams in the class, of which we have two coming up, and no formal final!

Despite the short week, I had enough to share about generalities of the class, and how they affect me, in order to reach our 350 word minimum requirement for the blog posts. And just in case I didn't make this explicit in the last post, this is an extra credit assignment. We are to write a weekly blog post to you the audience, who is hopefully interested in taking the class and wants some personal insight on it. I personally enjoy having this as an assignment as I think that it will help me to improve my writing skills, while also giving me some perspective on how I am doing in the class. We have two additional extra credit opportunities in the class, which I may expound upon later.

Until next week...

~Sophie

Week 1 - Course Description and Introduction to Project 1

Hi,

Here is a little recap of my first week of this class. On the first day we went over the course description and some of the details of turning assignments in, a daily quiz structure, and what books we will need for this class. Professor Downing said that this class has a writing flag, which everyone in CS needs,  and I believe is one reason that many students will opt to take this class. In order to fulfill this writing flag we have to write a 3000 word report! Wow. Luckily the professor said that we will be breaking this up, so it will not seem like a huge task.

Over the rest of the week we moved on to talking a bit about the Python programming language, and then specifically about the first assignment, which is done solo by each student. I found it quite helpful that Downing gave us pretty full Java code examples and then compared them to the same bits of code using Python, which is the main programming language in this course. I have not used much Python before, so getting started with a new language while getting started with the first project adds a bit of work, and the comparisons with a familiar language seem to make the transition easier. In addition to Python in this class we will be using many different languages and frameworks in order to get some experience with full stack programming. This should help to prepare us to get a job, and I like the sound of that!

On Friday we had our first quiz, which surprisingly took me by surprise with its questions. I thought I had a handle on it, but I missed a couple of simple details, and that is what good programming is all about! Happily, I am not worried about it this early into the semester. I have been having some severe allergy attacks lately due to the record pollen highs and overly long "Cedar Fever" season here, and feel like once my head clears up I will be able to gain my focus during quiz time.

I'll let you know how this next week goes!

~Sophie