Hustle, hurry! We need those codes!
Did you get that, is it working?, need to do that, need to finish this ~ our Whatsapp conversations mainly revolved around our programming class (surprisingly).
“If I could teach every beginning programmer one problem-solving skill, it would be the ‘reduce the problem technique.’
For example, suppose you’re a new programmer and you’re asked to write a program that reads ten numbers and figures out which number is the third highest. For a brand-new programmer, that can be a tough assignment, even though it only requires basic programming syntax.
If you’re stuck, you should reduce the problem to something simpler. Instead of the third-highest number, what about finding the highest overall? Still too tough? What about finding the largest of just three numbers? Or the larger of two?
Reduce the problem to the point where you know how to solve it and write the solution. Then expand the problem slightly and rewrite the solution to match, and keep going until you are back where you started.” — V. Anton Spraul
I found the above extremely helpful while working on the code. It helped me understand better and made the code simpler. I feel extremely happy to have been a part of this course as I can say that I have actually taken back a lot, which also includes the curiosity to learn more about programming. Being the first ever course on programming, I feel really proud to have put up a chatbot on the stand.
The last few days of the course were quite hectic as all of us were frantically trying to up our game by trying to find speech recognition packages. The whole aspect of writing a paper, shooting a demo video and prototyping made us feel like we had a lot on our plate, but in the end it was totally worth it. The experience of working together was great, each of us had our own strengths and used those to contribute to the project. (A huge shout out to my fellow teammates, Natania and Krishna Pranav without whom the project would not have been possible!).
Also, special thanks to my facilitators Gaurav and Venkat who have been patiently listening to our rants about the code. I would like to conclude this by stating a quote I recently picked up from one of my facilitators.
Talk is cheap, show me the code!
P.S I have also written another post (when I was extremely frustrated while working on the code, please do check that out!)
