The lab this week was really difficult. I didn't get very far in trying to implement in-order traversals into a binary tree node. I'm hoping to ask Mr. Heap about this in his next office hour session.
In this week's lecture slides, Mr. Heap started with a couple of pointers to help us the the second part of Assignment 2. They really helped clarify what each function was supposed to do and provided shortcuts for some of them. If there is one thing I am going to remember about my time in CSC148, it's that I got a prof. who actually wanted us to succeed. Mr. Heap then introduced us into more sorting methods: quick sort and merge sort. Quick sort was completely new to to me; I never heard about it until now. Mr. Heap's tests and comparisons in lecture taught me how one simple detail in a function can drastically affect its efficiency. I was taught the concept of merge sort in high school but I never understood how to execute it in practice. I didn't even know that I could have a function nested within another function! But according to Mr. Heap's code, that is how merge sort would work: by using a helper function. In the lectures, Mr. Heap used a couple of cards and applied the concepts of the sort methods to help us understand them. By doing this, he stressed that learning concepts to be used in code is more important than simply learning more coding functions and methods
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