Week 1

At Monday's lecture, the first lecture of the semester, Dan informed us of Course SLogs. I love the idea of maintaining a blog. I'm sure this will help me review for the final exam.  Dan reminded us that we will not be using Clickers this semester -- which will probably drain out a bit of the motivation that wakes me up early in the morning and drives me into CSC lectures. Dan also mentioned that we will be studying recursion. I remember using recursion to build a function involving the Fibonacci sequence back in high school. That was
interesting.

On Wednesday, I was introduced to Turtle, but not much was done with it.  
Dan demonstrated how flexible Python is by adding instance variables into an already-made class, and by altering methods. He also added something along the lines of, "This should not be done. Use inheritance instead."  We had to read two passages and design the classes described in each text. The two classes we designed: Point; and Denominator. This helped me realize that I need to revisit those built-in methods in the "object" class (i.e. __init__, __repr__, __eq__, __le__, etc.).

We continued working on the Denominator class at Friday's lecture. I like that we worked on the Denominator class because it's such a simple class and I'm sure it's very useful.

During the weekend, I worked on Exercise 1. I've noticed that I have trouble reading the instructions and understanding exactly what our task is -- this was also the case with assignments from CSC108. For instance, in the first part of Exercise 1, the following was provided: "Your function should start with a first guess of 1.0, and continue until the difference between two successive guesses is less than the parameter eps."  I had trouble determining which guess (out of the two successive guesses) to return. Yes, the last guess is more accurate, but would that be the range of accuracy implied by the parameter eps?  I posted my question on the discussion board -- something I am very grateful for. Sadly, I did not end up with a clear answer. I settled with the last guess (rather than the penultimate guess).