Reading Week

     Last week, I was extremely distracted with my math midterm, and didn’t put as much effort into tutorial exercises and preparing for the quiz, but I don’t think it affected my performance. 

     This week, I am Internet-less.  I am spending reading week in Florida, and not having Internet access has posed some inconveniences for schoolwork.  I am currently at McDonald’s using their free wifi to post this blog.  I never realized how much I depend on the Internet everyday for school and other communication purposes.  Other than that tiny nuisance (and of course all the schoolwork I need to do), I am having a good time in Florida doing my favourite things: swimming, sun tanning, and golfing. 

Term Test 1 and…. SNOW!!!!

     Yesterday was the first term test.  Overall, I found the test easy except for the first question.  During the lecture where we began discussed the history of computing, I had to lave ten minutes early to go to meet the president of the university at the varsity golf dome for Tee It Off With The President.  Unfortunately, I think the material for that question was covered during the last ten minutes of class!  Oh well, I guess that its just my luck.  On a more positive note, even though there was a HUGE blizzard today, I didn’t have to get up and trek through the snow for the nine am tutorial!

     After studying for the terms test, I realized we went over Poyla’s steps for problem solving.  So far, I have not needed to use any of these steps in solving problems.  I am assuming that as we get farther into the course these problem solving strategies will become more useful.

Creating Animations

This week, I feel I have learned a more practical application for all of the functions and definitions I have learned in DrRacket thus far.  Producing static values is interesting, but flipping an image of a bunny to produce its mirror image isn’t going to impress too many people, or get you very far in life.  Creating animations is a step up from static values and, with a bit more knowledge, could produce more real world applications, such as creating an add that appears on the side of a website.  Animations are much more interesting, difficult to produce, and a lot more impressive (especially if you can tell your friends you can make a clock on the computer).

I found this week’s tutorial exercised a little more challenging this week, because creating animations is more difficult.  In particular, I found getting the big-bang function to produce exactly what you want the most difficult.  There are more variables when creating animations, you define more functions, and therefore it is easier to make a mistake.  I agree with s2d.greentea (http://c3daniisblog.blogspot.ca), creating animations can be overwhelming and separating all the commands into components makes it much easier to produce an animation that works and doesn’t have any errors in it.