First week recap!

First week done and bagged… Today we had our first real class with programming, and it was clear to see that a few in the class had previous experience from programming.

Make a program in java that prints out the prime numbers 1-100.

While most of us, had found the code online, and then familiarised ourselves with the code to understand it line by line. 5-6 of the students had created the code themselves with very little help from google. This gave a very good view on how to solve one assignment in many different ways.

• Solution one, was to create and refactor methods so every function was seperated from the rest of the code. This was the best practice for when we had to write big projects, however it seemed really over complicated for our assignment
• Solution two, was created with a little help from google, the code was about 50-50 from the student and then google/our classbook. Seemed very confusing for me. since it created alot of variables to be called in the different methods.
• Solution three, was a short  program of around 20 lines of code, with comments behind every line to explain the process. This was really well explained and made it seem very easy to understand.
• Solution four, was even shorter program, which the student had optimised for running as fast as possible, and our teacher had one input to make it run even faster, which was quite impressive.

For me the java code was understandable, but my problem was understanding the mathematical thinking behind it, to make it faster. But it was impressive to see the difference among the different solutions. i might update this post to show some of the code examples later..

We are not pupils, but students!

We were told this a few times during this week, and what it means is: We are responible for our own education, and this includes if we show up or not.. Friday we were missing 3 people, and some people left early. I dont know why people dont show up or leave early, but when its the same people that does regularly, it does raise the concern on their motivation for completing this education.

The atmosphere in the class seems very good, and it feels like everyone can talk to eachother, so i hope in the foreseeable future we can do some kind of social bonding, grab a beer friday after school or meetup for something else. I was very sceptical that i would like most of my fellow students, but so far i find them all decent human beings 😉 so for now there is no reason to call for exterminatus 😉

Weekend and time to chillax!

Well that was my plan, but since its birthday party tonight, and sunday is cleaning old apartment early in the day, and another birthsday party in the evening, only time left to study is saturday.  Gotta read the chapters in the system development book, an ofcourse learn more java. I want to see if i can manage to get the input mechanism to work with the prime number assignment. This should require me to get the scanner class to work, then cast it to an integer. and then put the variable into the program and run the algorithm.