Week 6: The First Assignment

This week was one of the more hectic weeks of my school career. With midterms to cram for, assignments to be completed, it was without a doubt one of the most stressful times of the year. The first assignment we had to complete in this course required basic programming knowledge as well as knowledge in recursion, both of which we obtained through the content covered in lectures, labs and exercises. At first glance, the assignment seemed very easy to complete as all you had to do was write method headings with their docstrings along with their method bodies for the classes provided. The difficultly of the assignment escalated quite quickly as the recursion and finding the most efficient method of sorting the cheeses on the various stools using the intermediate was difficult. Through collaboration with my partners and discussion, we split the assignment into various parts and helped one another in the parts that gave us trouble. As a whole I feel that this assignment contributed greatly to my group working skills as well as my skill set in recursion and strengthened my basic foundation as a programmer.

Week 5: The Method in a Method

Recursion is a concept of programming that I only skimmed over during my career as a high school student, and this week taught me many insights and techniques as well as the fundamentals of using recursion in programs. I have always had difficulties with understanding and tracing recursion as I had no idea where to start and how the programs actually handled such method calls. Through these lectures and the lab this week, I can say that my knowledge and understanding of recursion has increased exponentially as my TA gave me great insight on the significance of using base cases as well as using the methods of tracing recursions taught in the lectures and reviewed in the lab. I feel that the knowledge I have obtained over these few classes and labs need to be polished and refined more and that these skills I now have will be very beneficial for me in my first assignment involving recursion.