Week 7

This week was midterm week, definitely a lot of pressure. I had already heard that prof. Downing’s tests were very meticulous and detailed-oriented. I felt relatively comfortable with the multiple choice questions given that I had done all of the readings, and then for the Python short answer questions I think I did run into some trouble at first but I think that I was able to solve them relatively decent as well. Definitely challenging questions. However, in the longer coding questions I did take some time to try and come up with a good design algorithmically. I am not sure what the balance will end up being in terms of my grade. I definitely think that what makes this test most stressful is the fact that we only have ninety minutes. It’s a very short amount of time when you think of the type of questions that are asked there. However, to be fair, prof. Downing does give us a so called cheat sheet so we can bring any information we want to the test. In theory this also contributes to the idea that it’s a very challenging exam but it’s definitely nice to have an information resource during a test.

In terms of lectures, this past week we also went over Python’s concept or way of “overloading” class methods. Prof. Downing used the example of writing an equals method so that it compares content and not memory address because, as in Java, the generic equals method goes directly to memory comparison. We also discussed iterators, which had some strange parts to it such as if you call the iterator function on an iterator, it just returns the iterator itself. However, I do feel much more comfortable with Python and with my programming practices and standard in general since this class started.

The next part of the class consists on a project that has been assigned in groups of approximately five programmers. We need to be able to come up with a theme that expands to several other sub-themes. I am not sure what the other requirements of the project are since I was not able to attend class on the day prof. Downing first explained the project, but I assume this week will start off with more information regarding the project.