Final coming up

Sorry, I completely forgot to complete my blog post last week! I'm hoping I can still get 4/5 points for this even though it was completed late.

Anyways, I'm kind of excited to be taking the final next week. I feel like I learned quite a bit this semester, even though it was quite painful at times. I'm hoping it only covers items we've discussed and practiced throughout the term (I think it will). Ultimately I do agree that it was a good decision to eliminate the group project and have a final instead so that way it'll be easier to measure what people have actually learned throughout the course. Here's to hoping I do well on it!

This week

I think that the way we did lecture this week sounds great on paper, but when actually being put into practice might not be that great. I think it still has potential to be very helpful and useful, but some things, in my opinion, would need to be changed. The biggest issue I found with the way we did lecture this week was the fact that we were trying to follow along but I know for a fact that no one in the class was able to keep up in terms of our own program. It'd be much more helpful if we could follow along but I think this would be a challenge because it'd be very time consuming to make sure everyone was caught up. Maybe one thing would be to make the scope of the assignment much smaller and that way we could have just 2 phases instead of 3 or 4. That way we could make sure everyone was done with the first phase and then we could move onto the second phase. I'm still stuck on the second phase and have been struggling to get the data from the twitter json files I pulled from twitter. For some reason it keeps giving me an error saying that the index needs to be a integer instead of a string when I try to specify 'text' as the key to pull the data.

Updates

So far I'm really happy with the pace of this course this semester. I think the work is much more manageable and the pace is also making it much easier to learn the content. I like that we're going back to Python for a lot of the material since I don't really feel like I really learned how to use it that well in 601. Although I don't think I learned it that well last semester, I'd be really lost of I didn't take it and was trying to take 618. I'm really surprised that people are allowed to take 618 without taking 601, but it'd be fine if they already knew Python.

I'm still having some difficulties this week on the assignment, and have been trying to work through them since yesterday. I'll keep trying, but will be emailing the GSI if I can't figure it out by tomorrow.

Have you thought about my proposal to allow us to use the internet on the final?

Progress

I'm not sure if a lot of other students were in agreement with a lot of my comments from last semester but so far I'm seeing a vast improvement in the structure of this course which I'm really happy about. Specifically, I'm happy that we have one assignment to focus on each week. I think that this really helps us spend more time learning the material as opposed to rushing through to complete both assignments on time.

I'm not sure how I feel about having a final exam for this class. It's nice not having to work on a group project for this class because it's always difficult to work on group projects throughout a course. One thing I think would make more sense for the final is to allow us to use the internet since we would be able to use it if we were really programming. I don't think I've ever had to take a practical programming exam without being able to use the internet as a reference. Obviously this would not include email/chat programs and we'd still have to work on it on our own...

First week

I thought that the first week was interesting. Honestly though, I'm not really excited about this class. I think that this weeks assignment was pretty easy and will be easy to build on, but I think that as the semester goes on many of us will struggle to build on what we've previously learned because of inadequate time to process the previous items we learned. Hopefully I'm wrong about this and only time will tell.

One thing that I thought was interesting was the removal of the requirement to work with another individual. I, for one, was sad to see this requirement removed since I think it really helps working with other people because if you get stuck it's really difficult to work through something without being able to talk it out with another person. Unfortunately you can't make everyone happy, at least the option to work with someone is still available.

Wrapping up

I loved this weeks assignments. Especially the homework. I feel like the Google Maps API is really easy to work with, and the lecture was really helpful in explaining exactly what we needed to do and how to do it.

The project is coming along, slowly but surely. We're creating our visualizations right now and working on the paper. We're also in the process of loading everything onto a website as we complete the work. I'll be pretty glad to be done with this project because I didn't enjoy it that much. The topic was kind of boring to me... I guess it's my fault for not finding a group and letting myself get assigned.

This week

I think I liked the way we did the lab this week much better than normal. Even though it was combined with the homework and was longer and maybe more complex than normal, I feel like working on it was more enjoyable than normal because the stress of having another assignment right after was not there. Being able to work with someone on the entire assignment was also helpful.

One thing that I was not crazy about, and I know a lot of people were not happy about, was the fact that we had to finish the assignment 2 days after it was assigned. I had a very busy week this week and wasn't able to finish it in time to run it 5 times. I even forgot to do my blog post until now...

A suggestion

I think it would be much more helpful if we did the labs as a class so that we could follow along with you. Then having a homework assignment that is similar to the labs but different enough that it forces us to apply what we learned in the lab to the homework. I am still struggling to complete the labs and homework and feel like I am barely making it through each assignment. While being able to ask questions in class is helpful, I usually don't feel like I have many questions until I actually start the assignment and then get stuck. It's really hard to relay a question about this stuff through an email, and usually I have tons of questions and feel like I'm being too "needy" if I have to send 10 emails a week to the GSI asking questions about the assignments. In short, this class is making me feel dumb.

Frustration to the extreme

I am getting extremely frustrated with the content in this course. I'm not sure if I'm the only one, but I feel like we're going way too fast in terms of content and I'm getting serious information overload. I am not able to absorb old material before something new is introduced and that's becoming a serious problem for me. I know of at least 2 other students whom I regularly talk to that also feel this way. I don't understand why so much is packed into a 7 week course? It wouldn't be so bad if it was just doing the HW/Labs, but throwing a group project on top just seems silly to me. We don't even know the material and now we have to use it in a project??? Doesn't make sense to me... /endRant

Homework assignments

I'm finding that I really enjoy doing homework assignments when they involve modifying a current file (ie. the assignments with todo's). It's much easier to follow the code that's already there and assess what needs to be done. I find it much more difficult when we have to start from scratch because it just seems like it's much more difficult to wrap my head around what needs to be done. I feel like I learn more with the todo assignments because I'm able to focus on specific parts of an assignment and absorb that part as opposed to having to create a python file from scratch.

One thing I'm currently trying to figure out is how to use an or operand with a string. I keep getting an error everything I try to use "|" with a string. I figured out that my code is correct because I tried it with one string instead of all 5, but if I try to do more then one then I get an error.

New to Python

I'm new to Python since I tested out of SI 502 so it's somewhat new to me. I know Java and C# so I'm familiar with programming but have no experience reading in data and using code to change the data. I'm finding that some of the functions seem really obvious but I wouldn't think I'd be able to use them because I'm still in the mindset of Java where rules are much more stringent. Things like requiring your variables to be defined and spacing not mattering are what I'm used to, so changing my mindset is a bit of an adjustment. Either way, I love learning new things, and I especially like coding so I'm looking forward to this challenge and hope I don't get confused too much. It seems like there is quite a few resources out there to help me learn what I need/want to learn so I'm going to dive in head first.