7th week into CSC165

  Assignment 1 mark was out, below the average, and can't believe that next assignment is due only about a week away, next term test is only a week away! This class is going very fast. Got a lot of work to finish this week.

  

  Talk about this week's materials: Still, proof and proofs. I found that they are hard and abstract to understand at first, but once you kind of get used to it, and have a lot of practices, they will come handy and not impossible to be done. This week's practice before tutorial was pretty hard, I spend time doing it, even thought I got the answer, but I don't know if they are right or not, I think I just do have a clear idea of those kind of questions yet. And as always, the quiz is similar to the practise questions but much easier.  CSC165 is more and more like math now, the things I learned in MAT240, MAT157 and this course are all connected together, and they have a lot of repeated part. 

 At the end of the class, we finally started to connect the logics with computer science code. Instead of learning to program. We learned how to think when we program. I never really think logically when I do my programs. We just got started, but I like what we are learning now about programs and I feel benefited from it.

Week 6 Into CSC165

This week is the week that I got my midterm back. My mark was around 80 percent, which is not good enough for me, I knew that I could have done better. When I was doing the test, I was very unsure about my answers so I checked over and over again, but that indeed wasted so much of my time. In the end, I left questions together worth 6 marks blank. But the good news is, except for those questions I left blank, rest of them I got almost perfect. But the class average was pretty good, most people did really good or even got perfect on this exam. I have to work harder!

And we only had a two hour lecture this week, because Monday was thanksgiving. This week we are not just doing proof structures anymore, we started to learn how to do real proofs. And those things are hard to absorb all at once in class. I have to spend time after class to look over the slides so I can fully understand. But the real proofs are the more fun part.

5th week into CSC165

  This week during the first hour of lecture we complete our first mid-term exam. Many people found it was easy but not me. I had to think for a good amount of time before deciding whether my answer is truly right. In logic questions, if one step goes wrong, the entire solution wouldn't be right. I did most of the induction in my mind. I never had a strong memory and the process of solving a question is a long process. I was too scared that there would be one false memory, that implies one of the step is wrong, so entire question wouldn't be right. As a result, I ran out of time, the test was only 50 minutes, I left 3 parts in question one blank. I was upset about it, but regret is not helpful. I need more exercises, only the ones in prepare exercise, in class and the quizzes are far not enough to train me into a fast thinker.  
  The quizzes are easy as usually.

4th Week of CSC165

  This week's material is getting a bit more challenging. I found out that in order to success in this course, you need more logic than math courses. I'm already taking the hardest math, mat240 and mat157. There are a lot of overlapping knowledges between csc165 and these two courses, which made me feel more comfortable with the math courses.

  I start to see why my instructor Mr.Zhang told us in the first lecture: CSC165 is the foundation of all these maths. Tuesday's lecture gave me a strong impression. We used math symbols to prove different questions. Which are really interesting. I always enjoyed solving math problems. Questions we had are not that abstract, but neither not easy to understand, it's hard, but doable. Unlike math courses. They are not only about logics, and how well you can think, it also requires a lot of foundations, but everyone has a different learning background, some students will be much better in math that other students. I think CSC165 is a fair course, no matter how good you were before, you can succeed  
  
  I followed up with this week's materials, but in the mean time I know if I practise on my own I will fall behind. We were given an interesting problem in this week's lecture: FOLD problem. I'm currently trying to come up with a code that can generate how many and the order of up and downs when you fold a strip of paper multiple times. Today is Sunday and I've been trying it for few hours, I know the pattern in this problem, but maybe I don't  have enough knowledge about programming. I will keep trying, and hopefully get it in next few days.

  To end this week's slog, good luck to me on Tuesday's term test! See you next week!

3rd Week of Class

    This week's lecture was still about the language of math. I nailed it all the way through the first 2/3 of the lecture then it's getting confusing. I think I understand it better than others because I took Data Management in high school and we learned the similar things, but just in a lower level. The materials are definitely not easy, but I believe if I do enough exercise and understand the concept, I will be able to handle it.

   Tutorial on Thursday was not as helpful. I had a lot of questions about the prepare exercise. To me the exercise questions were ambiguous, I had answers for all of them but just not sure if they are right. We took the questions up really quickly, most of the time it was just someone wrote the answer on the board and we move on to the next question immediately. I was trying to understand the other people's answers on the board but we started the quiz right after that. The quiz was much easier than prepare exercise. I'm starting to work on the assignment now, hope I'll have a better understanding next week!

First 2 weeks in CSC165

  The first lecture I had for CSC165 was awesome. I did't like my lecture section because it's 3 hours straight in the night. I was worried about that it would be too much theory for me to handle. But my instructor Larry Zhang made the 3 hours enjoyable. He told us that we are in the best section because we can get the entire week's lecture done in one day, it immediately made me feel much better. I also liked my instructor's teaching style. He was using powerpoint to present the course materials and sometimes he makes little jokes, the class was pretty active. 

  Except for introduction, we talked about some mathematical and logical problems, I understood everything, and felt involved. The first week went well.

  Second week of class for CSC165 was slightly harder. The course material was Quantifiers, Sentences and Statements, Predicates, Implication and Equivalence. It's hard to tell the differences between Predicates and Sets, I can understand them individually, but when they are been put together, I get confused. Even when I look at the explanations on the powerpoint, it's still not that clear. In order to solve that problem, I'm asking this question on Piazza, if it's still not solved, I have to go to office hours or ask during next lecture. Except for that, everything was fine. Mr.Zhang is more serious this week than last lecture. 

  The first tutorial I had was good. It was good because I'm confident about the quiz. There was one paragraph of reading before we answer the questions and draw the diagrams. When I was still on the second sentence of the reading part, someone already finished the quiz and handed in, I'm surprised how smart people are in my class, and feel a bit stressed at the same time. I need to work hard.