Week 12 - Wrapup

So finally, this was the last week of the course. We didn't learn too many new things this week. As the title suggests, it was basically a review of what we learned throughout this course.

We had only two classes this week, and Dan talked about the structure of the final exam on the last class. I must say, it seemed very useful.

Moreover, we had to submit Exercise 4 this week. Like the other exercises, this was pretty easy as well. But I did need a bit of help at the beginning in trying to think of the algorithm for the max_node method. I went through our TA, Bryan's slides on binary search trees. They were extremely useful. Furthermore, I would like to add that Bryan is very good in explaining, and I found his lecture earlier this semester very helpful.

Just before writing this slog, I checked and found that all my tests for Exercise 4 passed! So this makes me get a perfect score on all the exercises! Yay!

We are now at the very end of the course and the only thing remaining is the final exam. The words "final exam" seem to scare me a lot because I have a feeling they are quite harder than the term tests.

For now, I have to keep calm and study, and make the most of the days before the exam. My main plan is to solve the past term tests and exams, go over the exercises, and solve the questions we were given on the tests this term. I don't really think it's a good idea to go over the readings or lecture slides anymore at this stage because we know everything by now. And all we need now is practice!

That's all I have for this week and this semester. I haven't really seen much feedback from other people till now. Please comment below if you have anything to say about my slogs. It was fun taking CSC148 this semester. Hope to see most of you in CSC207 and other courses in the future.


Good bye CSC148!

Week 11 - Test 2

This was the 2nd last week of the course, and there was nothing new taught to us. This week was fully dedicated to Test 2.

On Monday, we went over some sample questions and solutions for preparation of the test. I personally found these very helpful.

To me the test was not very difficult, although I managed to get a poor mark. I believe I could not keep myself cool during the test, and that is what has caused me to do poor.

I did practice quite a lot from the past tests and exams before the test. In fact, I even solved the last question on the test (implementing an iterative version of the append method for the LinkedList class) quite comfortably at home. But however, I failed to deliver in the test. Actually I did a very small mistake in the loop in the answer to the question, and had to lose 4 out of 5 marks for that.

Overall, even though I did quite bad in the test, I am not too unhappy with myself because the mistakes I did were very pretty small. And I believe, this will make me even more careful and focused during other tests/exams in the future.

This week was not a very challenging one, and it ended with Dan going over the solutions for the test.

As Dan said, Exercise 4 (the final one) will be posted very soon. Looking forward to that and the final week of the course!

Week 10 - Sorting

This week we learned about something which we came across before in CSC108. Yes, we learned about different sorting algorithms.

We were introduced to different kinds of sorts (i.e. selection sort, insertion sort, bubble sort, merge sort, etc) last semester in CSC108. But now, we are learned about the implementation of these sorts and their run-times. At the beginning I seemed to enjoy the topic, but soon I realized that it is quite complicated. The main difficulty I faced was to keep up with the lecture. I had problems understanding the implementations of some of the sorts, and soon I got lost while Dan was speaking. This happened to me several times during the lecture this week.

I am currently reviewing the lecture slides to get a better understanding of the implementations of the different sorts. All the algorithms look quite complicated, especially the ones for quick sort and merge sort. I think I need to go to Dan during his office hours next week to get further help.

To be honest, this week has not been good for me. I couldn't make use of the lectures and failed to understand a lot of things during the lecture.

However, I started and finished part 2 of Assignment 2 which was posted last week. It involved a lot of recursion, and I am proud of myself that I finally got a hold on recursion!

Oh well, the marks for Assignment 1 got posted earlier this week, and I did pretty well! It was a great source of inspiration for me to work harder on Assignment 2.

So, finally we are done with both the assignments, and now it's high time that I start studying for the test which is coming up next week.

Hoping for the best!