SLP A

In my first slog I wrote that most of my problems with computer science classes went away when I joined university. Originally I felt like most of my problems with the course went away for good with university courses, but now I realize they just became less meaningful. Beforehand I would find being confused frustrating, because it meant that for a while I would be stuck in the same place and restricting me from moving forward. Now I see confusion as on opportunity to learn something new, or strengthen something that was weak. When I started I felt like my ambitions and interests were far away in third and fourth year, but first year has gone by so quickly that it doesn’t feel like I will be waiting long at all. I said my main goal for this course was to create a foundation that I can build from in years to come in computer science, and I think this course and my performance have done a very good job at doing so.

I’m actually intrigued by recursive functions for the time being but I’m sure I’ll learn to loathe/resent/fear them in some way somewhere down the line. 

The first test was written this week. I felt the 50 minute time constraint was a bit much, because even though I could tell how to implement every question from the moment I read it I couldn’t write the functions and docstrings in time to finish everything. I ended up having to omit a few docstrings to gain some time for the last question, which I didnt really have the time to write how I wanted. If I could do it over, I would probably leave one of the three questions blank and take the 20%, and make sure I did well on the other two. This method would have netted me a comfortable high 80 or 90 percent assuming everything went well.

Inheritance is not a topic I am entirely unfamiliar with, in grade 11 a friend and I used it to save work when we were designing a two-player chess application for our final project, and used a class “Piece” to define all of the pieces (knights, bishops, etc). I didn’t exactly know what I was doing (someone on stackoverflow always did) and abandoned the project for something simpler. Since I hadn’t seen it in over 2 years now, I am happy that I got the refresher.

I found the entire experience of computer science frustrating. The courses feel as though their difficulty is being artificially inflated by restricting the realm of possible solutions to any given problem by imposing style guidelines limitations on the flexibility of high level programming languages. Questions on evaluations are left intentionally ambiguous, with a combination of useless information and meaningless adjectives that offer little to no useful info. Although it is easy to see where things are headed, goals and aspirations feel distant and you never feel like you have accomplished anything meaningful. This combination leads to the awkward “I want to move faster but I have a hard time keeping up with what I’m currently learning” situation. This was all until I started working at a university level, where things started to gather meaning and there was help to overcome whatever obstacle was giving me trouble. Most of my problems with Computer Science faded away within the first two weeks of CSC 148. My main goal is to create a good foundation for study in more specific fields later on.