01.25.13

Second Entry

01.25.13

"First challenge: hop over the quagmire"

This week was extra busy for me with a new backstage staff role I volunteered for my college's musical. But since the lectures were still at 9 a.m., each abundant with new concepts in computer science, it had to be my responsibility to keep up with the pace. Fortunately, Professor Heap was as cheerful as always, so I regained the energy to work harder.

This week's lecture was, so to speak, a continuation of last week's material on operating DrRacket. In addition, I learned about the basics and the history of the process of problem solving. Tracing back from ancient methods of tally systems that were groundbreaking at the time but are extremely antiquated now to modern computers that are much smaller and faster, I was amazed by the progress over the years and felt very privileged about the modern technology. I also felt a little ashamed for often yelling at my smart phone and my computer for being "slow." I should really appreciate them more.

Because I was quite interested in the history, I read carefully the web page about a rough chronology of computing devices Professor Heap had posted on the course website. Having that page to further my learning was great. It was a little too technical and difficult for a non-computer-science-student to understand, but I did enjoy reading and researching from there on to explore this new realm of knowledge.

Thursday's lecture was especially interesting because of the physical simulation Professor Heap assigned to two front-row people on each end of the lecture hall to demonstrate the usage of computer language (binary system.) It was rather comical to see people trying so hard to communicate with each other in that manner, and it also made me pay a better attention to the material.

To prepare for the quiz, I reviewed my course notes and watched the videos, just as I did last week, because simply doing those two steps seemed to work well for me. This time, I was glad to find a copy of last semester's quiz, which in the end helped a lot to study for the quiz. For now, the quizzes are not too taxing, but I wonder what more I could do to prepare for these assessments when the material gets more complicated near the end.

I have been going to and leaving from my tutorial earlier than others because I have an English tutorial situated in Victoria College right after this tutorial. Although I had promised myself to have nice chats with Professor Heap and my TA before this week, I did not have a chance to do so yet. Right now, I need to first receive my last week's quiz, e-mail my TA about my SLOG since it seems like my link is not among other people's on the course website (though I did hand in the pdf on time), and visit Professor during one of the office hours before January ends.