Upcoming Week

As I gear up for another week of CS 1121 I am coming into this week with a bit more confidence. This weekend I focused mainly on working on my first homework program. Although there was minimal progress on the program working by myself, I was able to find some help in the learning center. I visited the learning center on Sunday night and the learning center coach was able to effectively help me with my problem. It was a bit frustrating because I still am not 100% on everything, but the coach had enough patience to help me at least start my program. I now know that the learning center will be my first choice of help if I am stuck on any sort of CS 1121 homework. I'm now ready to tackle this coming week and the CS 1121 challenges that face me!

Class on Thursday

As I would have guessed, this whole programming gig is getting harder and harder as the semester progresses. We talked more about loops in Thursday's class, but it was something that I had never covered with MATLAB so it was completely new to me. Nested loops were the main topic of Thursday's class and Dr. Poplawski stressed that loops are a complex, but essential component of programming. This class is going to require me to really manage my time better and the addition of our first homework program is not making things much easier. I plan to go to the Computer Science Learning Center Sunday evening to get some extra help with my program, so hopefully by the end of the weekend I'll be farther into my program and ready to tackle next week's challenges.

Class on Tuesday 1/24

It was another fun-filled Tuesday of programming. I attended the CS 1121 lecture for the day and my lab section was also scheduled for that evening. In class today we were assigned our very first programming assignment and we went over the different loops. These different loops have the same objective, but have different syntax. It was not too hard to follow along with the lecture today because I have dealt with loops in programming before, but programming loops in Java is a bit different than MATLAB. Dr. Poplawski ensured us that we are going to make mistakes and it takes practice to become good at using and applying loops in a program. This was very encouraging and just show that with hard work I can do anything! 

Upcoming Week

As I gear up for another week at Michigan Tech it only mean another week of CS 1121! I have set to complete the readings for Tuesday's lecture, but from what I have read so far it is very similar to programming with MATLAB. This particular chapter is about loops and MATLAB has its own way of creating loops while writing code. The fact that I have previously programmed with MATLAB puts me at somewhat of an advantage because the syntax and logic flows are very similar. For example, the selections section of our textbook seemed like a cakewalk to me because I have previously dealt with those and only needed to learn how to apply them to Java. I realize that not everything about Java is similar to MATLAB, but my previous experiences gives me a good idea of what is to come next.

CS 1121 Week 2

During week two of CS 1121 we started to get into some of the basics within Java programming. We learned things like variables, expressions and operators in Tuesdays class. Because of my previous experience with MATLAB programming, this lecture was fairly straight forward because Java compares somewhat to MATLAB. We dealt with these topics more in the CS labs where we became more comfortable with writing basic code. During today's lecture, we dealt mainly with if statements. As Dr. Poplawski explained more about if statement it got me thinking. By using these if statements it just makes programming one big logic flow which is quite interesting.

CS1121 Week 1 Class

The first week of CS1121 went pretty smoothly. We basically went through the syllabus and whatnot and introduced the whole idea of an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and the IDE that we used was Eclipse. Dr. Poplawski explained to us the significance of an IDE and how it corrects any Java syntax errors before the user runs the program. Using Eclipse in the lab during the first week was a bit difficult, but after Dr. Poplawski explained it to us and used it for examples during the lecture, it instantly became second nature to me. I also recently installed Eclipse on my computer, so CodeLab assignments and homework programs will be easier to do with this tool at my fingertips.