CST 205 Week 7

Week 7

This week is the final week and it's gone pretty well. My team executed the final project nicely, even though we usually end up working on it right before the deadline. I'm pretty happy with the end result. We made a memory game and redrew the squares of an image to help guide the game. The user makes their selection with input in JES. The labs were quick and easy this week, too. It was very nice. In this course, we learned how to manipulate sounds and images. I found sounds to be the most useful, since I've never considered how to work with sound before. Future students will benefit from understanding these things as well. It's useful to understand the best way to save images and audio for your use case. My general advice for future students in this course is to do all of your individual work as soon as it is assigned, since (at least in my group) it is unlikely you'll be able to meet with your group then. When the deadline approaches, you don't have to worry about it. If you don't understand something, I find that my best resource is YouTube and Google. Use them. Sometimes seeing someone else do something or present it in another way can be extremely helpful.

Assigned Readings

How to Get a Job at Google, Part 2 by Thomas L. Friedman (New York Times) 

This article spends a fair amount of time explaining how going to college is worth while and can build a lot of character. In part 1, I believe they had suggested that college may not be for everyone and that many companies, like Google, hired employees without college degrees. This follow-up article feels like it is defending college degrees based on responses to the last article. The gist is that students that work toward a more difficult degree and come out as a "B" student are more valuable than those that come out out easier degrees, like Communications, as an "A" student. Because the student had to work really hard through their career, they show their dedication and problem solving ability. In a career, they'd be able to come up with solutions (and not just have the problem memorized).

Internal Problem Solving Guide

The first point was to read Mind Tools' What is Problem Solving? article. Apparently, there are several named ways to solve a problem. In the article, they describe a basic four step problem solving method where you compare routes you've come up with. The other methods are called the simplex process, the appreciative injury process, and the soft systems methodology. The internal google document provides questions that can be asked to clarify what the problem that you're having is and lists a few ways getting the solution can be approached. The best solution I saw in the document was to have someone else review your work.

CST 205 Week 6

Week 6

This week we covered lists, dictionaries, reading files, and good programming practices. Python has some nice features for their lists, like joining two together with a "+". So, [1, 2, 3] + [4, 5, 6] will be [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Also, it's really neat that the values in a dictionary can be different for each key. It's extremely flexible.

The projects this week have been pretty tame. One lab was an individual lab and the other was a pair programming assignment. Both of them were pretty straight forward and simple. We began working on our final project this week, too. My group is going with a memory card game, so that we can use both the text-based game requirement and the image manipulation requirement. I think we're off to a good start so far and I'll be looking forward to finalizing it next week.