Impressions of the first few weeks: Week 4

My initial impressions to the first few weeks of class have been rather lack lustre, in terms of material. Even though the concepts introduced in the initial stages were overall more difficult than CSC108 I still don't find them very challenging, though  I still had small lingering questions. Contrary to their difficulty I can recognize their usefulness and can admit that these are core aspects of programming. Within the first  few weeks we went over object oriented programming, abstract data types, special methods. Object oriented programming was a simple concept to grasp for me, having some programming experience in java, I could pick up the interactions between methods, different classes and objects. So ,what I learned from the first few weeks was not the topic of the lecture but more of a appreciation for the knowledge for programming I already had.

In regard to the lectures and classes themselves I have been really impressed at the teaching style of not only my professor but also the environment of the tutorials. I found that preforming labs with partners was very helpful because being able to bounce ideas off of each other helped each others understanding of the topic. In lectures, my professor has done a great job at trying to portray different coding methods visually instead of leaving it in it's ambiguous python form. For example, the ADTs were first introduced as real life examples before delving into the coding aspect. All in all, the learning environment was convenient and beneficial.

The lecture slide posts on cdf are a nice bonus too.

Why geeks should write

It's a common misconception for most students, lying on the mathematical side of the spectrum, that by entering a field of study such as the sciences they can "escape" having to write a lot. of course I have come to realize this is incorrect on many levels, and it is arguable that english aspects are more prevalent in jobs as a whole than mathematics.The key characteristic in english that is must in computer science, or any science for that matter, is the art of communication. With that I pose a question: what good is research and projects without the skills to explain it to others? As you can see, scientists need to have a strong understanding communication to portray their ideas.

Communication is something a scientist needs to on the job to pitch ideas, document work, write reports, and verbally show how their project works. To be specific, a computer scientist's piece of art is their program, the very purpose of that program is to make a task easier for the general public. Although, the program is only as good as users knowledge to wield it, so its the computer scientists job to properly show how the program operates. A GUI or just a user interface needs to properly dictate what the program is for, what it does, and how to use it, if the UI is not specific or lacks linguistic simplicity, it is not well formed. For example I can't use techno-talk to a regular consumer because they won't know what any of it means but to a scientist it would provide a deeper understanding of my program. A computer scientist should know to be precise but effective in getting the key information across whether it be showing a user or a fellow programmer what the program is for and how to use it.