The first lecture of CSC165 introduced some concepts to me
that I had not seen before. Luckily, Professor Zhang kept it light by having
several funny memes to reiterate his points. I saw some Python code for the
first time and that was confusing for me because I hadn’t had my first CSC108
lecture yet. It’s too bad the code wasn’t in Java seeing as I already know that
computer language. Soon enough it became clear what was happening and I was
following along better, not easily as the concepts were still new, but better.
The problem solving approach by George Polya was shown to us and it seemed very
reasonable. I think most people follow that method without realizing it since
diving into a problem without any plan is likely to lead nowhere. I found the
streetcar problem interesting, I thought I had all the facts right but they
weren’t adding up to a solution. In the end I was thinking too much like a
human, I hadn’t realized that when Person B says, “that still doesn’t really
tell me how old they are” that they were actually able to do the calculations
and conclude that the previous information of the product of the kid’s ages and
the sum does not give one solution. I enjoyed working on that with the class as
it was a team effort to solve. Next we were taught about universal and
existential quantifiers, this part seemed very straightforward as it is easy to
tell when a sentence describes all of a set or only some of it. I left the
lecture fairly confident in what had been discussed, I wish I could say the same
about the second lecture, but that one was quite different.
The second lecture started off strong, with confusion that
is. The “before today you talk like” and “after today you talk like” really set
that up. The Venn Diagrams were clear enough, but still made difficult to
understand due to the expressions they represented being unfamiliar to me. The
symbols from chapter 1.5 were then used to replace the expressions I was
already having trouble understanding. As we went over it more, I began to
comprehend what was happening. I felt like I could follow, but would probably
be unable to do any on my own. The next set of Python functions used to
describe quantifier claims were simple for me to understand, the use of the
word “all” and “any” in the functions had a lot to do with its simplicity.
Before this class I did not know there was a difference between a sentence and
a statement, it was explained well and I was able to grasp the concept. The
same goes for the predicates that we learned. At first the implications made
sense in the form of an if…then… statement. Then the sentences without the
general format came and that was really quite different for me as I am in no
way good at language courses, high school english was usually my worst course.
It made sense once the answer was on the screen, but before that I usually
couldn’t tell which one was P and Q. The idioms and “weird” equivalence
statements were easy to follow. The class concluded with the “before” and
“after” segment it started with, which I still didn’t understand. Leaving the
class I felt quite shaken and definitely unconfident in the course.
The tutorial questions seemed simple enough when doing them.
Then I arrived at the tutorial only to find I had done the entire second
question wrong. I hadn’t realized that the Venn Diagrams had to be filled
enough just to prove the equation and I filled it how the question would appear
to be filled when the statement is true/false. After correcting and
understanding my mistake, the quiz was surprisingly simple to complete. Seeing
as this is my only class that has material I have never seen before I would say
it is my most difficult at the moment.
