Thoughts on My First Computer Science Class and Great News

So about the Computer Science class.

It was easy at first. Super easy. And then…it slammed me in the face like a bag of bricks swung at my head. I got really good grades on my first two projects, an A and B. But we only built pieces of programs. And then the 3rd project.

I stayed up until 6 am on Thursday, the last day of classes. I searched everywhere. The guy previously helping me on Code Newbie Slack was offline. I livestreamed my coding. Got some advice from a really nice guy. But it contradicted everything I was taught because he was more advanced than me; he was about to finish up his Computer Science BS. I searched all night and morning. I knew I needed to use an array, a for loop, and ArrayList as well, but the concept of arrays confuses me in a sense that I had five words and I needed to grab a character from those words, that I needed to access randomly. Somehow I got stuck on how is Java going to know if the input matches the letter I am trying to pull out of this array? I was completely overthinking it and it was due in one day.

Our prof emailed us collectively and told us that everyone seemed to be having trouble with Activity 1 out of 4 and we could turn Activity 1 in and tell her our thought process we could get partial credit. I had a working Activity 1 and a broken Activity 2 and turned them in with my thought processes. I expect a D or C on this thing.

I saw your email about people struggling with just Activity 1. I got it done insofar as I got the game to run once; if you guess right everything is printed out to the screen. If you guess wrong you get a tick. Then I ask the player to quit the game. I will be working on it again because now that I think about it I don’t think the game quits when the player wins. In any case, this tested my mettle as someone who wants to be a developer. I don’t think as an Intro student I was ready for this. I livestreamed doing the activity and some guy who is finishing up his BS in CS remarked it was some final project for Intro students. Heh. It doesn’t discourage me, however. I have the activity in a markdown file and uploaded to a site that parses markdown so any time I want to come back to it and work on it, I will. And I’ll probably do that during next semester, as I take the Intermediate class.

This class started out easy enough for me as I had experience with programming and got progressively harder. But what I learned is that I am understanding the interconnectivity between different languages and applying the principles like OOP to each project I work on. I will not be creating a class since it is due tomorrow at 1. But I understand how to do that and look forward to implementing it and working on it in the future.

Thanks for your wit, btw. It made coming to class enjoyable.

Thanks for the great semester and I’ll see you Tuesday for the final.

Best,

Tiffany

She wants to mentor me, yall. And this is a new beginning and a new era for my CS journey.

Just in case you’re curious, here is my code to Activity 1 and the repo will be listed below.