Week 6

With the first midterm for this course coming up, I can't say I'm not nervous. I plan to use the old midterm he posted on the course calendar as a "diagnostic" for how well I know the material. I'm not sure if it will be reliable enough though, since Mr. Heap mentioned that he planned to design this midterm differently. I wish he posted more prep exercises and review material. Nothing helps understanding concepts and methods more than applying it.

I had a bit of trouble understanding the order traversals Mr. Heap showed us this week. I can grasp the concept but I don't know the structure of a function that would return a traversal in a specific order. I'm hoping maybe some peers on piazza might be able to help me with this but even with help, I'm sure this topic will cause me problems on the midterm.

Week 5

The lab this week gave me the well-needed practice I needed for tracing. I thought it would be hard at first but when I actually tried it on Notepad on the computer, it was actually pretty easy. I found that tracing code really helps me with understanding how programs work and debugging a program if something goes wrong. I applied the tracing methods with recursion during this lab and it really helped save time.

The way python searches for names of variables and functions was something new to me. I imagine this could help me create and structure code in a more organized manner. I've heard of the terms "local" and "global" before but the term "nonlocal" was new to me as well. Nevertheless, I'm sure that knowing this will be useful for my future programs

Week 4

So this week was basically more on recursion. It must be a pretty big topic for it to need more than a week's worth of lecture. I was pretty fascinated when I ran tree_burst.py; the arrows moving, turning and leaving trails was pretty cool. I think that a program like this could be useful when drawing diagrams or making charts. When I saw the M(n) function for recursion though, I was overwhelmed. I don't know if I'm ever going to be familiar with that formula; it's way too long and complicated! The way we trace recursion though was something new to me, something I didn't learn in high school but it looks pretty handy. Mr. Heap was right when he said that simply plugging in values would save time