Week 6 - Assignment 1

Unfortunately I did not finish the assignment on time. I thought the due time was 10:15 but I got an email saying it was at 12. Well its too late now but that extra two hours would of helped me a lo. I basically finished all the step except step 5. Last week, I said that I didn't know what the point of tracing is but now I know. It helped me a lot about what's going on with the recursion method M(n). It helped me come up with a strategy to finish the problem. Unfortunately, that strategy is flawed and I didn't have enough time to sit down and come up with another strategy with the help of tracing. So instead, I decided to use all of my short remaining time to make my method much more complicated which still doesn't work for n > 8.

So I guess I feel pretty down and ashamed for not finishing the assignment on time. I guess that means I'll need to start on my next assignment earlier.


That is all.

Week 5

Welcome back :)

I did some recursion in tutorial this week. I'm glad I've got to practice with it but I feel as if I still lack experience. Recursion is still mind bending to me. So I feel like I need to practice with recursion more.
Not only that, I feel like I still don't know when to use it. If I come in a situation where I'll need to use recursion, I'll probably think of a different solution like loops without realizing that recursion would be a better option.

I guess I just need more practice with recursion.

Another thing that I didn't understand in tutorial was "Trace". I can see that there is a relationship between Trace and recursion but I still don't know what it is. To me, it just seems to be a waste of time.

Anyways, I'll be practicing trace and recursion over reading week. It also seems that the assignment will require me to use recursion. I have started on it but haven't done enough to speak about it this week. So expect me to talk about it next week!

Recursion and Inheritance

Welcome back!

I've know about recursion and what it does for a long time now. But I never found an opportunity to use it, nor do I ever think about it while programing. However, it appears that there are a  lot of emphasis on the importance of recursion. I hope that I'll come across many examples and situations where I'm forced to use this. It looks like we'll be working on recursion next tutorial, so I'll be looking forward to that!

Speaking of tutorials, this week tutorial was once again, useful. The biggest highlight for me that occurred in that tutorial is working with inheritance.
I've never really understood the importance of inheritance. I felt as though there is no point in inheriting a class if you can just make a new instance of the class instead. However, I was taught that there was an important reason of why you would use inheritance. In an inheriting class, you can have methods that belong only to this class, rather than the class it's inheriting from.

Unfortunately, this tutorial did not really instruct us to make methods within the inheriting class. I think It would help be much more benefiting for me if we were to do so. Hopefully I will come across a situation in the near future where inheritance will be used.

But for now, I'm more interested in using recursion. I'll be looking forward to next week's tutorial!