The Wait is On

Why is it that it isn’t until after the test that you realize you have made tonnes of mistakes? I guess if you are unprepared this will happen. Although other things like stress and the pressure of time would also cause us to make mistakes.

Personally for me I feel like everyone else. After the test on Wednesday all I can think about is “WOW I can’t believe I did not think about that. Why am I so dumb? How could I forget that?” However now that I have had time to reflect, I have come to realize that we are only human and there are times where we will make mistakes. At this point all I can do is learn from my mistakes and move on.

 

So don’t beat yourself up over something that you can’t change.

(above is an animated picture of an upset girl on the verge of tears.)

Don’t worry about things in the past.

(above is an animated picture of a girl who is all greyed out and not colored in, she has  a blank face on and has a look on her face that seems like she is not there)

Don’t lose sleep, worry about your mark

(above is an animated picture of a girl with a dark cloud around her, in addiiton her cheeks are sunken in and seems like she has not slept in days)

Some wise words from a wise friend : 

 “ it’s time to move forward and put this test behind [us]. The real test is yet to come.”

(on the left is an animated picture of a nerdy looking boy playing a guitar)

With that in mind, lets all start preparing for our next battle. Let us all be ready so that we will not have any regrets!

Lets go Troops ! We can do it !

(on the right is an animated picture of four girls wearing army print getting ready to attack)

Let the Games begin

This week was a revisit to a topic we had done in CSC108, sorting. We learned two new sorts, quick sort and merge sort, on top of the three (bubble, insertion, selection) that we have already looked at. The thing I enjoy most about this topic is when Dan runs all the different algorithms with a really big list of elements. It kind of reminds me of the Olympic, where it’s a race to see who finishes first. Imagine that! Sorting algorithms as an Olympic sport : 

“and the winner is ….. Insertion Sort !!!!!! Folks at home, the crowd here at the Olympic stadium has gone wild!!! What an UPSET! I guess that O(n²) efficiency does win sometimes. Who would have known!”

(above is a picture of the Canadian womens hockey team right after they beat the USA at Sochi)

Another notable thing that occurred this week is that I made a “Slogs I Like” list. It gives me joy to know that my posts somehow lead to an enjoyable read for someone.

So I would like to thank berkelycolortran for making my week!

(above is a picture of a berkely colortran)

On a side note: I do recommend anyone that is reading this post to check out berkelycolortran‘s slog. It is very informative, organized and it is easy to read.

Now to everyone writing the test this coming Wednesday:

I know studying is probably the last thing you want to do this weekend BUT, 

study long and hard, and don’t forget to take breaks once in a while! 

(above is an animated picture of a girl studying for a test and smoke is coming out of her head and she is saying she "cant concentrate", the picture caption says "Studying, They Can't even make studying Fun in animes")

It’s the last computer science test we will have before the final exam … 

YOU CAN DO IT !!!

(on the right is an animated picutre of a girl with a determined look on her face and a headband that says "Do Your Best!")

Cereal for our Early Morning Class

This past week we went over permutation approaches to finding anagrams, Big O notation and efficiency. 

It was very interesting to learn of the signature method of finding anagrams of a word. 

    

Anagrams are words that are the same length and contain the same letters. As such we can make charm equal march.

(above are two pictures, on the left is a picture of the lucky charms cereal and on the right is a cartoon picture of a leprechaun and the word March)

Initially, I could only come up with the straightforward method of making every possible “word” combination possible and comparing it to a list of valid words. However, Dan went over the signature method, which is a faster and more efficient approach.  The signature method is when the letters to a word is sorted alphabetically and this is word is compared to another words alphabetically sorted list of letters. The lists are called signatures. Similar to how everyone has their own signature, each word has a different signature, unless it is an anagram of another. When the two algorithms are analyzed, the signature approach is faster with longer words. Although, after learning about it I found that I liked the signature approach better.

Furthermore, this week we also learned Big O notation. When Dan introduced big oh notation the first thing I thought of was cheerios. Although it seems weird, I found that thinking about cheerios made the lessen easier to understand (although I think this was due to how hungry I was that day). Never the less I seemed to have grasped what Big O notation is comprised of ( the worst case that the code will ever have run time wise).

(on the left is a picture of the Cheerios cereal box)

Although conceptually I understand Big O notation I think implementing it would be difficult. This is since I felt the same with recursion but similar to what barelypassing148 said, 

“ most of the time … coding for me is, well trial and error, until I either get it right or give up” 

(on the right is a cartoon picture of a guy holding his head and the word "overload" is above him in big letters)

As such, I hope that on Monday Dan goes over Big O notation a little bit more, so that I can helpfully learn more about it before I become lost.

 So until we learn more about cheerios  ….. or even other brands of cereal!

(above is a picture of twelve different kinds of cereal)

It's March !!!

I can’t believe that in a month CSC148 will be over. This semester has gone by really quickly. We have learned things from raising exceptions to trees. Although recently it has gotten more confusing since Dan introduced Trees, Binary Trees and Binary Search Trees (however differentiating between them is simple, after some practice that is).

Our recent topic, LinkedList has proven to be a bit difficult. Although what many of use have learned is not to rush into things we don’t know. The last two labs that we had, were the same. This is since many of us started coding without actually knowing what was being asked.

Thus, trying to solve an issue we don’t really understand may result in a bunch of valuable time wasted. Compscikitty brings up a good point, in which:

“unless you are explicitly forbidden to ask for help, 

for an assignment per se, then take advantage of your 

resources”

(on the left is a picture of a cat typing on a labtop)

As a result, if you truly can not figure out what the lab is asking then ask your TA.

Other resources as igotthealgorhythm points our is the discussion board.

""After the first time going over assignment 2 I was extremely confused. Going over it a secound time didn't help much either. I eventually went over to the discussion board looked at questions from my fellow classmates and also, asked my own. This turned out to be very helpful and I understood the gist of what to do."

(on the right is a nerdy looking cartoon boy dancing)

Now with all this in mind …. on to e3 ! Go Go Go!!

(on the left is an animated picture of a crowd with their arms held up in the air happily cheering)

Computer Science Test 1

This past week our class had our first computer science test. As like any other test, everyone was nervous leading up until the test day. I, like everyone else in the class, was no exception. Although this test was based on easy concepts like trees and stacks it also included recursion.

On the test there were two coding questions, and two tracing ones. The coding ones were based on stacks and recursion while, the tracing ones had a tree question and a recursive one. Personally I found the tracing questions to be very simple, since I understood the concepts. However, when it came to the coding I was not as sure. The stack question I had to write code for was fairly straightforward. On the other hand the recursive one gave me trouble.

The recursive question asked me to find if a given string is a palindrome or not. A palindrome is something that is the same forward or backwards. An example of a word that is a palindrome would be ‘civic’; meanwhile words like ‘honor’ is not a palindrome.

(above is a picture with two sections on the left is a cartoon panda sitting down with the caption " HONOR is a palindrome" while the right side is the same panda with a different caption saying " wait no it's not")

During the test it was hard for me to figure out a way to solve the problem without using a loop (one of the restrictions given). Thus this test showed me that I did not know recursion as well as I thought. In a way I am upset that I did not get the question right, however I am glad to figure out my weakness before final exams.  

This means more studying for me ....