Week Ten

            The past week was the tenth week of class, so only five remain till the end. The past week was fairly uneventful in the class proceedings. We went over more material of the course without much issue, though the professor did send out an email mentioning how no one seems to go to his office hours, where he offered to help in both current class work and overall academic career issues. The email of course reinforces my long running comment on how Professor Downing cares about his students’ well-being both inside and outside of the classroom setting. Anyways, the typical idea is that going to your professor’s office hours is probably for the best, though I cannot speak personally for Professor Downing’s since I have never been to them, but it stands to reason that they would probably help if you are having trouble with an academic issue. Though if I am to justify why I myself have yet to go to one of his office hours than that is simply because my schedule leaves me with very few free times during the week to do so and those I do have are typically taken up by some work or university bureaucracy nonsense, but I digress.

            This week also involved further group work on the project, which thus far has been going slowly. The group design is still useful and good, though my group may be running into an issue, not because we are bad students or are trying to shirk the work, but because we are good students and this is the time of the semester when classes start trying to either cram in the last bit of material or tests before starting to push the work for the final. I am not trying to say anything negative about any class, but it must be said that a computer science course does require a lot of outside work to program and reinforce the material. I think some forget that even though it is not a major specific course, that it still involves a lot of programming. So for those who are thinking about taking this course, make sure you can handle all the work along with your other classes.

Week Nine

            So this is the ninth week of class, which means only six remain before classes are completed. This week was interesting that one of the classes was spent listening to a talk about mobile app creation from a company offering jobs and internships to students. Professor Downing allowing this event to take place, during an entire class no less, shows how much emphasis he puts on his students succeeding and not just in class. As I have mentioned before, he talked a lot about various opportunities throughout the semester for getting an internship, which is highly beneficial to succeeding later on, by getting experience and connections. So this is a prime example of how much he wishes to impress this idea, by using a class day for that purpose. This goes to show how much he cares about the success of his students both in class and outside of class, rather than some professor who only care about getting the material across and nothing else.

            The other big part of this week was the due date of the group project. The inclusion of a group project in and of itself can be beneficial since he has both pointed out verbally and in reading assignments about how in a company one would need to work in groups to get programs or software completed, thus it becomes a glimpse at the real world situation. Plus it does go against the stereotype that programmers all work alone in the dark eating nothing but pizza. In either case, I am finding that for this project having a group is really beneficial and having a group who will actually communicate and do their share of the work is even better. Obviously one cannot always know in advance who will be like that or not, but the professor has at times suggested studying in groups, which would give you a better idea of who was serious and who was not. And the pair project prior to this did the same with a single individual. It does beg the question if that is all part of his design when setting up the progression of projects to culminate into a group project.

Week Eight

            This is the eight week of class, which marks the middle of the semester, as well as spring break occurring. My experience of class for the week was incomplete, since I was absent Friday. However, as I said previously it is a good policy to have to email your professor in advance when you are going to be absent and you know ahead of time. I did so and Professor Downing was more than fair, very generous in actuality, in his response to it. So that in and of itself reemphasized how much the professor cares about his students and how respect and politeness can go both ways.

            This week also marks the start of the group project and thus far it has been interesting, not necessarily in a good way. The group itself is working fine, it seems to be good. The “interesting” part is in the attempt at collaborating between groups, where Professor Downing was right when he said how hard it was to try and organize all the groups to accept a single schema. But that was to be expected since trying to unify eight groups is fairly difficult. Anyways, my group by itself is just fine. The professor on the first day made us write down the numbers of those sitting by us in an attempt to get people to talk, which worked fairly well with regards to creating a group. It let us contact some people we talked to to create a group, since we knew a bit about one another to help facilitate working together.

            Other than the group stuff, the week consisted of discussing the project and a very thorough look at joins. Not to get into detail on class material, it just reemphasized how much he wants his students to understand the material. He will go in-depth into the material to literally beat the point across till it is absolutely clear, which is not a bad teaching style. It works for those who need to see examples, whereas it is a tad tedious for those who get it the first time, but the needs of the many usually outweigh the few in this regard which is fine.

Week Seven

This is the seventh week of class, as well as the start of the group project and the first test. With regards to the group project, he allowed the students to organize ourselves into groups. To sum up how that is going, well only 6 of the 8 groups for our class have actually been created. Granted my own group is not helping in that regard since we have seven people as opposed to the required six, an issue I hope is being taken care of because so far I have not been informed of what the deal is.

Anyways, the week leading up to the test went fine. We learned new material on Monday, had a review session on Wednesday, took the test on Thursday, and then had Friday off. This was a pretty good design, because the Monday helped to get us through material he put on the study guide to study for the test. And rather than continue new material on Wednesday, he decided to do a review and put off the material till after the test. I think this was really helpful, because it let us ask him specific questions that may have come up while studying and it did lead to a few hints as to what he wanted us to focus on for the test, seems it really does pay to attend class, but I’ve said that before. The test itself was not too bad, but it was definitely one where attendance paid off a lot, because the readings and the projects can only take you so far and actually having someone teach you the material as well as be able to answer any questions you have is fairly useful when learning computer science, or anything really. And the free day came in handy because my group used it to meet up, because we knew we would all be free during that time, since it was our scheduled class time anyways. It does make me wonder if that was his subtle way of trying to get groups to meet up.

Finally, the policy I adopted in my previous Elements courses with Professor Mitra, has been further reinforced as a good idea for classes where the professor cares about attendance, which I have said many times that Professor Downing does. And that is that if you are going to be absent and know ahead of time that you are, it is probably a good idea to let your professor know, either in person or via email ahead of time. At the very least it is just polite and respectful, especially with a professor who cares about his students fully understanding the material like Professor Downing.