- What did you do this past week?
This past week, my main focus was completing the first phase of our web app project. I added in some instances of colleges and universities to our site, created the individual instance page for both the colleges and universities, and made some enhancements to the about page. Our group got an early start on the project and everyone did a good job communicating their responsibilities to each other so the first phase went pretty smoothly for us and we finished early.
I had a Finance test this week which I did well on, and my partner and I worked on our Data Mining project which is implementing another ML algorithm for classifying data. Like usual, I have been attending running club Monday through Thursday, and this Friday, I volunteered with Code Orange where I helped my mentee build a maze game with Scratch. Lastly, I celebrated my 21st birthday this weekend with some of my friends from the running club and my CS classes.
2. What’s in your way?
Not much is in my way right now as I have just made it through my first round of exams and the first phase of our project is done, but my group members and I need to develop a game plan to tackle the second phase. This phase involves a lot more work on the backend side, and while my role is frontend, I definitely want to observe their work and gain familiarity with AWS so that will be a learning curve to overcome.
3. What will you do next week?
Our group is meeting again today to look into want needs to be done for phase two and determine how to split the work. We then plan to get an early start as we did for the last phase and reach out to each other if we get stuck or have questions. Next Monday, we will get another project for Data Mining and my partner and I will meet regularly to work on that. I have homework in Finance and Business Management to keep up with. And I will still regularly be attending running club and Code Orange.
4. What was your experience of comprehensions, generators, and yield?
All of these concepts were new to me and it definitely took a while for me to grasp. Yields were particularly interesting to me because it was an interesting control flow technique that I had never thought about for and can potentially reduce the lines of code that I have to write. And with generators, the concept of creating a list that could be consumed puzzled me for a bit.
5. What made you happy this week?
Being able to celebrate my 21st birthday with my friends made me really happy this week. I am definitely grateful to have a lot of close friends that I can hang out with, and it was great seeing some of my classmates that I hadn’t seen in a while. Some of my running friends hadn’t met my CS friends and vice versa, so it was cool to see everyone get to know each other.
6. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
A tool that we have been working with in Code Orange is Scratch. Scratch is a programming language that uses drag and drop puzzle pieces and is a great way to introduce CS fundamentals such as for and while loops to kids and beginners. You can make your own Scratch account and start making a game: scratch.mit.edu
