Reflection Period: 8 – 12 February, 2010

I can’t believe that even a weekly thing, I managed to screw up on updating.

Feb 8: Not much happened, although I found out that my housemate is kind of an ass, and he hasn’t paid rent at all yet, which is sort of annoying for the resources he’s using up.

Feb 9: I really wish I actually had done something today, because sitting inside and trying to occupy myself started to get to me after awhile, and I can’t actually remember what happened after about 1p.m. Pretty sure I didn’t leave the house though, so at least there’s that.

Feb 10: Turns out the used copy of Rock Band I’m slowly buying from a shop near me really needs the space it’s taking up, so I guess that’s one of my new priorities. Anyway, since I’m updating on a Monday, not Saturday, I can’t remember what I learned in my course on Wednesday…oh, now I remember.

Now, if an array is a line of variables — say, numbers — and a 2D array is like a square of variables, while a 3D array would basically be a 3D array of variables, am I the only person who can’t picture what a 4D array would be? I’m kinda able to get what it would hold and how it would work, but I can’t even wrap my head around the Tesseract, who is supposed to be able to get this?

Feb 11: Learned how to, if I ever was a teacher, avoid teaching for awhile. Teach your students one method of doing something, like say, code to hold strings (words) and do functions with them, then as soon as they’ve probably grasped it, teach them a completely different way to do almost exactly the same thing, saying that they should forget the previous way they just learned to do this method. Then, when their heads are spinning from learning, then forgetting, then learning something different, tell them that they actually shouldn’t use that new method most of the time, but sometimes they WILL need to use it.

That was basically my Thursday. We learned different functions to apply to string variables that would add text to existing text, replace text, calculate the length of a string and a few others. Then we learned how to do all of the same stuff using slightly different syntax for Unicode characters, in case we have to port the program to international countries. Oh, but wait, we shouldn’t use Unicode all the time, because it uses twice the memory to store the extra characters. It was informative, useful, and the syntax wasn’t that different, but it really felt like a cop-out on the teachers’ parts.

Feb 12: I did wake up on time this week, though heading off at 6:45 wasn’t much more pleasurable than sleeping in until the minute I had to be there. Today’s topic: Pseudo-Code. Basically, pseudo code is just writing on pen and paper (or in a Notepad file) what a program’s code would look like, but in plain English. This way, you not only get the program’s issues mostly solved before you spend the time coding, but when a non-programmer picks it up, they might be able to actually understand it. The guy I was working with and I didn’t really do well on the ‘plain English’ part, because we basically wrote the code down.

The tasks were to pseudo code the algorithms that would be required to A) make objects in an Asteroids game wrap from one side of the screen to the other, and B) make the Ghosts in Pacman chase Pacman and correctly turn so that they go closer to him. While the Asteroids one was easy, it actually took us over two hours to almost get it before we moved on without finishing it. Even though it’s an old game, it confused us on how to do four things:

1. Make the Ghosts chase Pacman
2. Make them turn when they could
3. Make them not turn when there was a wall
4. Make them turn in a different direction if they couldn’t go the way that went straight to Pacman.

It really frustrated me by the end, but my partner did point out that 6 days in, we’re at the summation of these guys’ careers in programming one of the most well known games that exists.

Second half of the day we got to do nothing, basically. We learned how to set up and use SVN for later in the course, but that was done in about half an hour, so we were basically done about 2 hours early.

Unfortunately, my day was still not over. After the course ended, I had to go and manage unmanageable kids from 6 p.m to 10 a.m the next day. I did find out what a medium sized pizza from Pizza Hut looks like. …Terrible.

Alas, we have come to the end of our reflection time, but you must always remember the lessons you receive here, my students. During your week, whatever your experiences, share them with another. The good, the bad, the funny, it all makes us complete as human beings… *more deep, thought provoking whatever*

Regards,

≈Roy