CSC148 Last Impressions Post #10

CSC148 is now almost over! Only thing left are exams. So far CSC148 has been a great course and I have learned many new programming concepts like recursion, trees, linked lists, and more. Overall I found Danny's teaching to be great and the worksheets in lectures really helped. Though again due to the strike, some of our labs were cancelled and I was unable to fully understand some of the concepts that we learned later on.

Some of the hurdles that I had while taking the course was really trying understand recursion. It took a while until I understood what was going on when a recursive function called and what it exactly does. At first I found the tracing to be quite simple, but that was because we were just working with numbers. Though when we got into trees and implementing recursion into them, that's where I got really lost and confused.

The idea of passing in objects into recursive functions was what confused me the most because objects have properties and it is really difficult to keep track of the object being passed in after a couple recursion calls. I hope that for the final exam, I will have mastered recursion, trees, and linked lists.

What I found to be easy was what we did in the beginning of the semester, which was on OOP and inheritance. I found that those concepts were a lot more straight forward. I even did pretty well on the first midterm.

The assignments were pretty challenging too, especially assignment 2 with the whole minimax strategy. I remember that when I was working on assignment 2, I was really lost because I still had not understood recursion well yet and I thought that assigning us to figure out how to implement the minimax strategy was just too much of a challenge. In assignments 1 and 3, I had a few problems but overall I think I had a better understanding of what to do for those assignments than assignment 2.

Test 2 was also a small challenge but I did okay. I found the questions on Test 2 really challenged my understanding of trees and linked lists and was a fair test. I hope that I can make up for the marks I lost on the final exam as well.

So now that CSC148 is over, I hope to do well in next year's computer science course and learn many more concepts to expand my ability to program. Thanks for reading!