I decided to join a group for the 2nd assignment.  I was tasked with completing the fractal  code.  I spent the first day trying out different things to solve the check expects and easily passed the check expects but I realized later that the just passing the check expects was not enough to finish the assignment.

The next day I decided to use the problem solving method taught in the second week of lecture.

Understand the problem

I studied the code and read the instructions within the fractal code in order to figure out what exactly I was supposed to accomplish.  I realized that for the the Sierpinski check expects I wasn't supposed to just pass the check expects but I needed to write a recursion.  The other part of the assignment was to add [question answer] pairs that altered the depth and base of the Sierpinski using arrow key presses.

Devise (one or more plans)

I created a plan that involved writing a recursion for for sierpinski in terms of (param-depth) and (param-base).  I also created a plan to model my key presses after the ball assignment key presses.

Try the plan

I attempted to implement the plans. I had to brain storm for a couple hours how to arrange the syntax so that Sierpinski was written in terms of param-depth and param base.  It took a while but I hit a break through .

The key press I modeled after the ball assignment didn't work at first, because I had four arguments instead of two.  Once I figured out my mistake it was easy to fix.

Look back

Looking back I should have studied the structure of param and realized it only had two variables: depth and base.  If I realized that earlier I would have been able to solve the key press problem faster instead of having four arguments.



Thoughts on the course

I really enjoyed all the topics covered in csc104.  It had a bit of programming and some history/social issues about technology which have useful real life applications.  Professor Heap was a very enthusiastic lecturer and the TAs were nice and helpful when ever I had problems concerning Dr. Racket. 

I had a nice relaxing reading week.  I ended up going home to Newmarket to visit my parents during the long weekend.  Aside from my weekend, in CSC, these past couple lectures on networking and privacy have been pretty interesting.  I really liked Tuesday's lecture covering privacy.  The fact that you can identity a person using just their date of birth, gender and postal code is really cool but also kind of scary at the same time!