OCT 27th Slog.

Welcome to the second update of my SLOG! I just read my previous post before and I can’t believe how many things have changed in such a short time. In my previous post I was an exchange student who had arrived two weeks late to classes and had very little to no knowledge of anything related to the course, now I can at least say I know a thing or two about the DrRacket programming language.

For quizzes I’ve have found class instructions to be sufficient most times, however, just for safe measure I also do the practice exercises from the course website. I did a bit worse than I expected in some of the quizzes but looking at the PDFs I realized that apparently using blue pen in lieu of black subtracted marks, something I will take into account for the next Wednesday quizzes.

I can’t think of anything I am particularly proud of creating because, to be honest, I have let my imagination free, I first want to learn the tools available at my disposal before going full on to own projects. Although I did particularly like hide/stack, I thought it was very useful to be able to automate things like that in order to have less cumbersome code. When I have played around with code, I’ve mainly tried to recreate the things that were seen in class, to see if I’m just “copying and pasting” or if I actually managed to understand the concept itself. If I can recreate it with other numbers or pictures, then it means the concept is clear.

Definitely the concept of the “check-expect” is one that at first was completely foreign but now I’ve managed to understand clearly. Not only did I not understand how it worked at first but I also didn’t understand its purpose. What was the point of checking for errors if you could just run the function? Well, now I understand what the point of checking is and can do it clearly in Dr. Racket. I do have to admit reaching this point took some practice and tweaking with functions to understand what I was doing but the goal was met. In order to understand something, as mentioned above, I try to change the parameters or see try to see what happens if I change something, when I get to the point where the results are predicted before I do something, then I can finally claim I understand it.

Personally, at first I was a little bit intimidated by asking questions, since I arrived late I felt a little bit behind and “embarrassed” by asking questions that maybe were already known. Not knowing the University I wasn’t sure how TA hours worked. Now I do however, and plan to make use of them in the near future. I just haven’t had a good reason to go yet! Probably I’ll go for some help with the project next Monday!