CST 370 Week 5

Week 5

We're on to sorting algorithms! This week we covered selection sort, bubble sort, insertion sort, and merge sort. I definitely feel like I have an advantage in this aspect because I've covered it so many times and I believe that I have a good handle on it. The homework was pretty straight forward and didn't feel like it came from left field, or another class, this time. I appreciated that. The programming assignment also remained on topic, since we implemented sorting algorithms ourselves.

We also had our midterm this past weekend. I wasn't very excited about it because of my big flop last week and my lack of discrete mathematics knowledge (which I am just barely enrolled in!). I was glad to see that the midterm wasn't so heavy on the discrete math bit and was much more focused on the data structures and other material we covered. I was also surprised that there weren't problems covering converting infix notation to polish or reverse polish.

As far as the grading has gone, I feel like there has been a surprising amount of focus on C++ language specifics. I really feel like the grading on our assignments (homework and labs) should be more focused on us understanding the material and concepts of what we're learning and not so much on the language itself, especially because this is not a class on C++ itself. Personally, I haven't used C++ since ~2009 (8 years!) and am rusty on a lot of the language-specific aspects of it. Our lectures and reading assignments aren't focused on these things and I don't believe the grading should be either.

Here is my video of the programming assignment this week: