Week 6

     So far, within the CSC148 course I have been focusing on maintaining a grasp on the topics discussed in lecture, and as much as the information correlates to lab content and quizzes, I am finding myself having a hard time grasping what material we will be tested on and what we should be taking away from the lectures. There seems to be a major discrepancy between the material broadly scanned over in class and the insight students are required to draw from these brief discussions in order to successfully complete the lab quizzes, midterms and assignments. As a result of this, the content of this course has quickly become increasingly demanding, disorienting and time consuming, especially when added alongside the demands of 4 additional courses. However, finding loop holes in my understanding of this class has quickly presented itself as a blessing in disguise for me in this course. The more I find areas left with gaps the more I search for information to tie in concepts loosely presented within lectures. Due to the time-consuming nature of this approach I have found that looking through other students' SLOG posts has been a saviour in providing quick, straight-forward explanations of how to sort through the lab and course content, especially when the TAs themselves are unable to provide a clear understanding of where our logic requires some touching up. One example of a thorough SLOG that has provided me with much needed aid has been http://keirnslog.blogspot.ca. I feel certain that for future attempts to clearing up my confusion I will be drawing insight from others that present more confident outlooks toward the course content.

Week 5

Impression of Week 4:

     During the 4th week of the CSC148 course, the class began covering the topic of Recursion. This was my first time being introduced to the topic and as much as it was not covered in the CSC108 course it felt as if we were being given more of a review than an introduction to this method of programming. Going through the recursion exercises in class made things seem simple to grasp however for the following lab I was shocked to learn that we were expected to code recursive methods with only about an hour of introduction to the topic under our belts. I was very thankful that we were not expected to know how to code recursive methods for the midterm test, without first being taught in lecture, however this method of teaching was very disorienting to me. I found it much more useful to trace given methods and first form an understanding of how the program would sort through the algorithm by writing out the outputs step-by-step. By the end of the week I still felt as if many gaps were left within my understanding of the definition of recursion and how it functioned so I found it very useful to find more examples online and fully define what recursion was used for first before trying to jump into writing out the outputs. By taking this one step at a time approach and filling in all the gaps left within my understanding I ended up feeling much more confident about the material by the time the midterm test came around. Hopefully as the course continues we will be provided with a much more solid framing of various aspects of recursion as well as future topics before we are asked to apply the material.