I had my thoughts about this course before starting the class, In a sense I was expecting much more mathematics being involved, and by that I basically mean the stuff we are learning in MAT135/136 combined with programming or some ugly mixture like that. However, as of now the course is quite different from that, well, actually much different from that. I believe this course places a lot of emphasis on communication and ensuring that we have the required tools and skills to transfer ideas back and forth with accuracy and efficiency. With that said, it seems that problem solving is also a significant part of the curriculum, and although we haven't seen anything too crazy in that area, i'm sure the brain hurting problems are on their way. Anyways, enough with that, let's talk about the lectures and the material we covered in these previous weeks. In these last few lectures, they were couple of things that gave trouble, but overall I found most things easy to grasp, especially things like the use of symbols, as it is something that I've already become familiar with in my Gr. 12 data management class. The few troubles that I encountered were mostly related to conversions, such as converting a sentence to code or vise versa, however, I overcame these problems by spending some time actually coding the examples from the lecture slide, or in other cases I would look over the annotated slides, as there are little things on there that can be helpful. For example, I like Danny's use of diagrams as it gives another perspective to the problem, which can become useful when you have difficulty understanding something.
So, overall i'm pretty happy with the course, it can be challenging at times but fun at the same time, and more importantly I believe it offers lots of good tools and skills that are surely to become useful. As of now nothing seems to difficult to understand, and hopefully that won't be changing anytime soon :)
The course won't be about math, but the mathematical rigour and proofs from MAT135H is something you will see later on in this course, but the focus will be on *how* to prove something instead of on the thing you'll prove.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you feel like it's not too difficult yet, I hope you can keep that up!