End of term course evaluation!

Phew, what hectic term it has been.  From the TA strike to recursions, I'm glad it is all over.

Naturally, the TA strike has been such a pain that I do not know when to start, except that perhaps I missed those quizzes at labs, such easy marks ... sad.

Recursions have been the main idea for this course, as this has been the method of implementation we haven used for Tree type data, which is the main way of organizing data we have learned.  I have to say that recursions are both tiresome and interesting.  Tiresome because, for some functions, it is hard to know what to do for it.  I know I have to do some kind of recursion, but I don't know how and getting the recessive model correctly by keeping track of each step of execution can be head aching.  I learned that it is better to write it down first.   In assignment two, for example, the recursion needed for strategy minimax was very difficult.  I felt i was implementing it wring not only because the model that I need to keep track of was complex, but I might not have understood correctly what need to implement.  This last part is the other thing that is confusing about recursions, since sometimes it is hard to know precisely what needs to be recursed.   Assignment three helped with my understanding of recursions greatly, since it allowed me more practise with recursions with functions that I thought were actually easier than some of the labs.  Start with the base case, and the write some code for when it is not a base case, etc.. which is easy once I got the hang of it.

I wished I made the effort to be make some compsci friends, given that I am a commuter, that would have helped greatly academically.  I would then be able to share my thoughts and confusion with them, which might have helped in my overall learning.



The classes were quite good, I learned a lot from Diane, as she makes it very clear the concepts of trees, ADTS, and recursions.  One problem I had was that perhaps Diane did not put enough focus on what kind of methods and functions would be useful when actually writing the code, as I am not experience with all of the methods, and that would have helped saved a lot of time for me personally to not have to look for methods that I could use.

This week in computer science has been mild, given it is the last week, and most of the time we just spent asking questions on exams etc..

Time for exams, yay!