CSC104 SLOG Week 9

-
What advice would you give to a student beginning this course about (a) how to design a function, and (b) how to prepare for this course?
My advice to a student beginning this course about how to design a function is to first describe what the function will do.  This can be achieved by writing a function contract, for example function-name: number -> number.  In addition, writing a full-design check-expect is helpful because we can start with our output value, and work backwards to recreate that output.  We can then substitute check-expect with define and each variable with a parameter.  Depending on what the function is intended to do, it may be necessary to think about special cases and recursion.  To illustrate, in the Fibonacci sequence, the first and second terms are both 1.  Therefore, when a defining a function to compute the Fibonacci sequence, we will need to include the special case of n < 2 in our function design.  Likewise, we can use the power of recursion to call our function multiple times within a single function call, to avoid the tedious task of manually calling our function over and over again.

My advice about how to prepare for this course is to consistently review the lecture materials because most of the topics build on one another.  In addition, the weekly exercises are very useful as they are representative of what the weekly quizzes will be like.  Moreover, I highly suggest attempting the past tests because they are also very representative of what will appear on the term tests.  Likewise, if you have any questions, the discussion board on Piazza is very useful since the TA’s and instructors answer questions from students directly.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CSC104 SLOG Week 1

-
Why did you choose CSC104? What do you hope to get out of the course? In an economics course last year, I was introduced to some basic Excel VBA knowledge.  Based on that limited experience, I developed an interest in writing programs so I enrolled in CSC104 to learn more about programming.  In this course, I hope to develop my problem-solving skills and learn some of the important principles of writing programs.  In addition, I have read that Racket is a much simpler, more consistent language to learn compared to other programming languages.  Therefore, I can focus on developing long-lasting skills and habits to support my academic and professional career. What did you expect programming to be like, and how does it compare with your experience in the course so far? (If you programmed before, how is programming in this course similar, and how is it different?) I expected programming to be like writing instructions for a computer to perform.  This involves planning, testing, a
Read more

CSC104 SLOG Week 8

-
What's something new you learned this week in class? In class, we explored binary notation.  In particular, we learned how to express numbers in binary and add and multiply binary terms.  This is a topic that I have been interested in learning more about since the beginning of the course. What was one of your achievements this week? One of my achievements this week was completing Project 2.  I found this project very interesting and was pleased to see that I was able to apply some of the course material.  Overall, my group members and I understood the requirements and we were able to work through the project fairly quickly.  However, upon testing our functions, one test occasionally kept failing.  To get help, I visited the discussion board on Piazza, and discovered that there was an error in the original check-expect provided in the project.  The instructor posted the correct check-expect, and from that we were able to pass all of the tests. 
Read more

CSC104 SLOG Week 5

-
Image
What's something new you learned this week in class? In class, we learned how to design a function using a local definition.  This allows us to filter a list using different variables.  Moreover, we learned how to work with colors and began to use image->colors and colors->image, to modify images.  What was one of your achievements this week? One of my achievements this week was completing Project 1.  I decided to work alone on this assignment, and I was pleased to see that I was able to apply some of the course material.  Overall, I understood the requirements and was able to work through the project fairly quickly.  However, upon testing my functions, one test kept failing.  To get help, I visited the CS Help Center and one of the TA’s helped me identify the source of my error.  From that point, I was able to correct my function design and complete the assignment.   
Read more