Description and Goals
Programming has been a passion of mine for a while but I have been a little rusty due to being out of practice since, starting with the IB. Therefore, I decided to work on the code academy course to improve myself and make sure I improve at programming. To carry out this I must setup a programming plan and select topics in programming that I want to learn. Further on, I must also, keep practicing daily so that I become familiar with the language of programming and become comfortable using it. It's a long course and will take some time but I am willing to put in the effort.
April 21, 2020
8:20 PM
Challenge & Skills
Collaborative Skills
Commitment & Perseverance
Initiative & Planning
Strength & Growth
I finished the first topic of the programming course and it has been a very interesting/ fun process. Firstly, it was a little difficult at first to remember the syntax of the language. However, I then quickly started getting back into it. For the next couple of topics, I need to work on my syntax a bit more and focus on improving it. The algorithmic thinking is still there and the next step would be to focus on abstraction in programming where I must learn how to use an object oriented approach to solving problems. This will help me in my computer science journey. It has been a little frustrating to do all of this. However, I also advised my best friend to start the course with me so we can motivate each other and nothing is more rewarding than having an achievement and the satisfaction of finishing a topic with a friend.
As I continued with the programming course. I realized that my knowledge of the syntax (rules of writing in the computer language) was majorily improving and my weaknesses lied in the logical thinking. To help fix that, I started looking into some basic algorithms online and trying to comprehend how they worked. Hence, getting myself into a programmer's mindset. A single syntax error will mean that the whole program will not work and it gets very frustrating and challenging to locate errors as the program becomes more complex. It requires great commitment and perseverance to continue working despite these setbacks and finish the course.
Finally, this has been the last week of programming on this python course. This course has been an amazing learning curve. In the end, I learned a lot about logical thinking and how a programmer must approach a problem. For the future, I would love to learn an Object Oriented programming language. The plan was easily customized for this course with choices being made on a daily bases with what I want to learn in this course. Further on, when I needed help I would always post it to the forums associated with this particular course and a response was given in details. Additionally, I felt like it was my responsibility to add to the forums and decided to answer a couple of questions. Throughout, I had difficulties learning the syntax despite it being very similar to English. For example, I would always forget the parenthesis that are supposed to be added for the 'print' function however, after committing and working on it, it finally became second nature.
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