Week #10 Summary

Last Wednesday we had our second term test. Unfortunately, I mistakenly thought the second term test would be on Nov. 20 and did not realize it until that Wednesday morning when I received the professor's reminder. As a result, I only spent a couple of hours preparing the test and mainly focused on the "longer notes", which I thought are the most challenging materials to me. Even though I was not that well-prepared, I feel I did well for the test, especially for the Dr. Racket part, as I always understand and keep up with the tutorial materials. On the other hand, I still feel that I could do better on the first two questions that are about the general computer knowledge, and maybe I should read some articles about it to better prepare me for the final exam.  

Project #1

Our first project assignment was due on last Friday and I think I did pretty well on it even though I haven't received the results. That project mainly asked us to add several definitions to make the entire program run properly. Basically I didn't experience any difficulty adding the definitions, but I was confused about the first three lines in the file at first. It said: "

;; The first three lines of this file were inserted by DrRacket. They record metadata ;; about the language level of this file in a form that our tools can easily process. #reader(lib "htdp-intermediate-lambda-reader.ss" "lang")((modname sneeze) (read-case-sensitive #t) (teachpacks ()) (htdp-settings #(#t constructor repeating-decimal #f #t none #f ())))",

with them copied to my definition pane of the Dr. Racket, my program can't run successfully. I later figured out that those lines are really generated automatically when saving .rkt to .txt form. So I shouldn't have copied and pasted all those stuff from the .txt file but should save it and then open it with Dr. Racket. By doing so, those lines did not appear on the definition pane. In the end, I successfully finished all the needed areas and submitted it with the properly run sneeze simulation. 

 

Difficulties That I'm Experiencing So Far

During this week's lecture, we got our first term tests back. My mark is ok but did not reach my goal. After analyzing the results carefully, I found that the Dr. Racket parts are fine for me, but the general knowledge or history of computers and computer programming is the part that I found more challenging.

In order to make improvements, I plan to pay more attention on first half of the lectures when the professor is usually introducing the history or general knowledge about computer programming. Moreover, I plan to carefully read those "longer notes" posted on the course website under each lecture to better prepare me for those kind of questions.

There are some other questions that I'm facing as well. It seems like we still haven't gotten our Wikipedia Assignments' marks back so I'm not sure how I did. Furthermore, I can't open the rubric for SLOG assignment and I'm not sure whether we are supposed to have access to it, so maybe I will ask the prof. for clarification during next week's lecture.