So that Programming Project..

Where to begin...

I've just taken my first serious look at the Programming Project and immediately have an overwhelming list of questions. Is there some sort of graph or plane I should be superimposing the maze to? What exactly is a cell? I understand that it contains a number for x and a number for y, so would this just be a point? Should everyone's maze turn about to look the same or are there several ways to complete this task?

I feel confident in my ability to utilize many of the functions we've been practicing in lecture like map, apply, structs, list manipulations etc. but am unprepared to design something as complex as the maze. So far, there hasn't been much top-down design that students have employed. I'm further concerned that I was told to begin the PP before the test next week as it will be a useful study tool. I've read over the project details a couple times now and don't have a clue where to start. I will be a regular fixture at the computer science help center this week!

In better news, American thanksgiving is coming up and I will be spending a short vacation weekend with family. After unsuccessful attempts at the project, I made a Turducken!!

First Impressions and a Fickle Dr. Racket

Entering this school year, I knew I could no longer procrastinate taking this computer science course I had been dreading. Admittedly I was completely ignorant to what it would entail, or anything really, having to do with technology. I cherish my Nokia flip phone and am a terrible driver. On the first day of lecture I imagined a room full of students breezily writing code as I fumbled to change my view settings, praying the professor wouldn't notice. Instead the first few classes were more about manipulating pictures of Koalas and explaining Dr. Racket. Although I'm embarrassed to say how many attempts it took me to correctly enter (require picturing-programs) in the first tutorial.

The layout of the course seems to be geared to novice Computer Science students like myself. I like that we've progressed at a step-by-step basis, building and integrating new functions. Overall the course work hasn't been overwhelming or out of reach. Nested circles, the apply function all appear to be complicated but when broken down, are actually a set of more simple operations utilized in tandem. This has been one of the major points I've pulled from this class so far! That the image and number manipulations which look so complex at first can be analyzed into their smaller components. This has made the idea of computing much more comfortable and approachable for me.

However the exactness of form in designing functions has definitely been an issue. I find that I am not always sure what requires brackets, spaces, dashes or whatever else. Since Racket is so sensitive to this, I am usually left reading and cursing and rereading my functions before I have any success. I'm also interested to find out how all of our learned functions will relate to our ability to complete more sophisticated images and manipulations. Perhaps the Programming Project will be related to this?

We should be getting more info on the PP today in lecture, so I'll probably be here to vent about that in the near future..