Test Stress

We had our second term test last week. Looking back now I can try and evaluate my performance. At the beginning of the term actual coding had given me a really hard time. I had not yet developed the concept of computational thinking. So that's why I threw my all into trying to understand how to program properly. After weeks of practicing, and paying attention in class I felt like I knew pretty well how to answer any questions on the test about Dr.Racket. What I did not expect of course, is how much I did not know about the history of computers. There is so much information that was covered in class, that I couldn't really understand or remember all of it. Even with the fact that we were allowed a cheat sheet in class, and I quite literally covered every millimetre of that paper, I found I could still not answer fully the first two history of computer questions. And to lose nearly 10 marks makes a pretty big difference, so I was pretty disappointed. I think the steps I need to take to correct this issue is to focus equal amounts of time on both the history of computing and the Dr.Racket questions. If I had paid even a little bit more attention to the history, and studied it as hard as I did Dr.Racket I would have done much better on the test.

A Little About Me and My Feelings on CSC

Hello world! And also fellow individuals trying to learn how to be computer programmers. This is my very first blog entry and I was thinking of covering my basic experience so far of CSC104. I think it's probably a mixture of awe, confusion, and with a little bit of frustration. This is my first course ever dealing with computers and programming. The whole concept is completely brand new to me. I had always been hopeful that I had some sort of genetic pre-disposition to programming, because my father is a seasoned programmer. He always would slightly push me into the world of computers by talking in great detail about their hardware over dinner. When I decided to major in Cognitive Science I knew that my dad would be ecstatic because I would be having my first official introductory course in computer science. This has been a course incredibly different from anything I have every taken. It seems to need a completely different way of thinking and problem solving that I often times find challenging and frustrating, but also strangely rewarding. My biggest challenge this week must have been the Wiki II assignment. I never knew editing an article would be so hard. I had an incredibly difficult time wrapping my head around the idea of editing an article using the concepts in Wikipedia. When I edited anything in the past it would be simply to change the wording or the grammar. I have never before had to use minor computer programming to edit anything before. I was used to editing with words, and not symbols. This caused a lot of stress for me because I wasn't sure if I was doing it right, if the formatting was correct etc. My dad could see that I was stressing out and came up to me and said, "Programming has its own languages too, you just have to learn them." I think that was the first time I really thought of programming as being its own language. I had then sat down and learned the special "language" of wikipedia editing by using their Help:CheatSheet page. After that editing the articles almost became fun, and it felt really rewarding to have figured out how to do it properly. My dad then came up and said to me, "see, you just have to think like a computer programmer."