#computerstudies

 I included a short description of President's College in my LinkedIn profile. The school offered subjects/courses that were not offered at other secondary schools at the time. Technical Drawing was one of those courses. Computer Studies was another.

Further thoughts on  my education.....

I started my career in finance and somehow ended up in the IT (information technology) field. Who would have thought? Maybe I should have selected a technical undergraduate degree. I am happy that I decided to study computer studies at O Level even though I was a business student. And, I am happy that I enrolled in many computer studies courses later on.

I found this old blog post on the project/coursework I completed for the O Level examination: https://moorefo1.blogspot.com/2014/02/this-past-week-was-my-feel-good-week.html (from blog: https://moorefo1.blogspot.com/)

This is an interesting video on the decision to study computer science at A Levels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHTSRSzgb4E

As a new CS student who had never got in touch with the field of coding before the course. I have gone through a stage of confusion and lost, but my persistence finally brought me to the end.  Some advices that I found are very useful are listed below. These strategies are essential to help you achieve in the course.

Design Method

In order to apply your creativity in your design, the first step is to understand the type of the function. Most commands can categorize into the groups of list, number, string, function, boolean and image. By understand the contract, we will get a comprehending  regarding what type of input is required to the gets the result that we want. For example:

(E 1)   

>

In this case, the input is a number, and the output is an image.

Another advice that helps to get more flexibility in your design is Conditional function. Conditional function is a useful tool that enables you to set up a unique computational action and selectively evaluate the answer based on the condition you set.

If (Boolean Condition) then(consequent)

Else ( alternative)

To analyze it, if you get #true, then run the consequent. Else, run the alternative. Conditional statement helps to achieve a causational logic pattern in your design.

For Instance,

(define (A x)

 (cond [(list? x) (2)]

       [else 1]))

In this case the Boolean condition is (list? x), if the input x is a list, then the consequent is 2, otherwise it will be 1.

Study Method 

  First and foremost, PRACTICE is the key to success in this course. Test questions are usually based on the exercises that were given by the professor. Practice the exercise over and over will get you familiar with the format of the test while enhancing your speed of writing (the time for the test is very tight).  

  Secondly, I would strongly suggest the new students make a good use of the “step” command. This is a very useful tool that helps you understand the intermediate steps. Throughout the term, I always use steps to understand the correlation between each part and how each step get to another.

Why did you choose CSC104? What do you hope to get out of the course? We are living in a digital age where the technologies are closely related and influenced all aspects of our life. I have chosen the CSC104 because it propels my problem-solving skill, computer skill, and analytical skill, these are all essential in both school and workplace. From this course, I expect to use computer software efficiently and build a strong foundation regarding algorithm and coding. I need to do well in the courses in order to gain a strong foundation to build on in the future study of computer science. Lastly, as an art student, I hope to develop my art skill not only on paper but apply it to technologies as well.

What did you expect programming to be like, and how does it compare with your experience in the course so far? (If you programmed before, how is programming in this course similar, and how is it different?

At the beginning I expected programming to be like knitting a scarf –it is a complex language that hardly understands by people. After my exploration in the course, I think programming shares many similarities with human language, lots of commands are building on the foundation of English literature, which is totally understandable. Dissimilar with human language, the programming language is precision and written in terse form. It needs to follow specific syntactical rules.

What do you find interesting so far? As a new explorer in the field of computer science, it is very interesting to see the result from different combinations of commands. I feel deeply satisfied when I understand the contents and able to use the command to create the result that I want. The class is enjoyable since professor allows us to take part in the activities and lecture. For instance, we get the opportunities to choose the picture and command that we want in the class.

What do you find hard so far? Is the course easier or harder than you expected? The course is little difficult at the begging since I never expose into any programming software and possess limit computational knowledge. Moreover, the pace in university is fast and vast in comparison to high school. However, it becomes much easier when I habituated the pace and understood how everything is functioning

How did you study for the quizzes? Are you satisfied with your performance on them; if not, what do you plan to change? I study the quiz through practicing the exercise that professor post on the website. I find the exercise is very helpful for the test preparation and I do see a great result from practicing the exercises. From what I learned in the past few weeks, practice and scrutiny are the keys to succeeds in the course.