CSC148 Week 10

A good portion of my week during week 10 of CSC148 was spent working on Assignment 2 Part 2. For my group, I was mostly working on the docstrings and the is_regex function. Although Danny explained in class a certain way to do an is_regex function, I didn't quite understand it. My partners and I worked on an alternate way of doing it without recursion and it worked from the results we saw, however this took a lot of time and effort compared to the amount of time we would've spent if we had figured the recursion out. Our algorithm was a for loop checking every character in the string, checking if the characters next to it were valid characters. Since there were so many possibilities, this took a lot of testing and the code turned out to be very long. Although the purpose of the function worked, I am a little disappointed since I wanted to make it work using recursion, but wasn't able to. It's already almost the end of the semester and I am really starting to get worried about my programming skills, especially with recursion and trees.

CSC148 Week 9

Week 9 of computer science focused on binary trees as well as other things. One thing that has been reintroduced was list searching from CSC108. My initial reaction to this was that it was going to be a pain again just like it was in CSC108. I had a lot of trouble with list searching in CSC108 at first but was eventually able to get it at the end. So knowing the pattern of how CSC148 has been going, the list searching this time around will be again harder to understand, especially in code form. It seemed so simple when it was being shown by Danny on the camera, which it is when we are thinking about it in terms of real life. However, on code it seems to me like it is much harder than thinking about it in real life. Running time analysis was also reintroduced this week which has got me even more worried. I must say I feel very overwhelmed going into the term test 2 coming up soon, and even more overwhelmed going into the exam next month although it is still far away.

CSC148 Week 8

Week 8 of CSC148 again focused on linked lists and going more into depth on linked lists. It was a pretty busy week since there was a lab like always but assignment 2 was also handed out to us.The lab consisted of adding methods to a LinkedList class, similar to the week before. I would still say that at this point that I still find this material very challenging to understand and keep up with. Last semester during CSC108, I already thought that a lot of the things we were doing were very challenging already. Now I'm here almost done CSC148 and I find that CSC108 was nothing compared to this and that this is at a whole different level. The hardest part for me right now is still understanding the recursion process in bigger problems. I always have to think more and sort of plan ahead before coding compared to before. However, I find that sometimes I understand what I am supposed to do but cannot put it into code which has been consistently been a problem for me when it comes to CSC148. There's also been more focus on helper functions on week 8 and although it wasn't that in depth, I understand its purpose. A challenge for me is applying this to my own code, instead of just following along in lecture where I seem to understand most of it. When I am alone, it's a whole different story.

CSC148 Week 7

Week 7 of CSC148 was a tough and stressful week for me because of the test on Wednesday of that week. Before I talk about the test though, I want to talk about the lecture on Monday and the lab on Tuesday. On Monday, we learned about LinkedLists and I found it interesting but at the same time confusing. Like many of the new concepts that I have learned this year, I found that it takes me a whole to understand it completely and LinkedList is no different.
On the lab, my regular partner wasn't there so I had to work on the lab by self. The instructions on the lab were very simple in my opinion but yet again, I ran into trouble when trying to code what I understood. The idea of implementing queue ADT using a linked list didn't seem difficult but it turned out to be harder than I expected. I wasn't able to implement some of the methods properly such as push. Although I had the steps right in my head, I wasn't able to translate all of it into code. The lab ended with me only passing half of the test cases.
I studied and prepared hard for the test in my opinion but I came out of the test not feeling so well. Even though I studied, I felt that a lot of my studying didn't help me so much, especially with trees. I think the most important thing I've learned on week 7 was that I shouldn't hold in questions that I might have. I felt like if I asked Professor or some other students more questions to clarify things I didn't understand, that I would have done better on the test, perhaps even if I studied less because some of my studying I feel went to waste because I was studying things I didn't quite understand completely. I want to make it a priority now to ask questions when I need help, not necessarily just to get better marks, but to gain knowledge and understanding of computer science, which as of right now is my major. Getting good marks but not understanding will hurt in the long run.