SLOG#1

I’m a first-year arts and science student of University of Toronto. Even though my program does not require any computer science courses, I still want to do one because it is useful and interesting. As the technology developing, the computer can help people to do many simple and miscellaneous works such as basic calculations, image graph, etc. But before we get the conveniences from computer, we need to learn how to send messages to let computer understand and then help us. Therefore, I decided to take CSC104. And from my expectations, I want to gain basic knowledge of programming, which can help me to use computer to do basic work and prepare for further study.

Since I never do programming before, from my imagination, I think programming is that we give orders to computer as input, after computer’s computing, it can output the result that we need. I do not feel there is big differences between my imaginations and the actual course. However, from what I learned so far, I feel like the “orders” is not as easy as I expect, which means it is hard to know each order means, and identify their own function. In other words, we need to give computer specific orders to get our output, but the learning of orders is not easy as I expected.

From my perspective, the most interesting part is to learn the new codes for computing, which is the most difficult part for me as well. When I was learning the transformation for images, I thought it was magic and I used this skill to make many new funny pictures. However, it is really takes me a lot of time to identify each code’s meaning and remember it.

It’s hard to say the course is harder or easier than I expected so far, because the lecture is not easy, but the quizzes are. In other words, I am lost in lectures sometimes and when I do exercise after class, I always got confused by how to do it. However, the quiz is not hard, which means as long as I do preparation and exercise for the quizzes, understanding each question on the review exercise, I can handle the quizzes.

I have my own habitat on studying, which is recall the lecture after class and then write down what I remembered and understood from the class. After the Professor posted the lecture notes, I can check which part I did not write down or understand. Since these processes is useful to me, when the quiz is coming, I just need to do little preparation to check if I am ready for the quiz. In other words, if I solved all problems and know each step clearly, I will not do any more work for the upcoming quiz, otherwise I will go back to check my notes or the lecture video.  When I think I am ready, I will try to go through all problems until I think I am well prepared for the quiz. Fortunately, I got full mark on the first two quizzes and I am satisfied with it.

To be honest, there is no specific Computer Science topic I am interested in since I still not have widely information about Computer Science. However, I’d like to try any topic about Computer Science which can help me to figure out which topic is the most attractive for me.