Life is a little less crazy at the moment thanks to Reading Week, which means I can finally catch up on my very long overdue SLOGs!
In Week #4, our main focus was Assignment #1. Luckily, I had a group that I had worked with frequently from CSC165, and we still worked together very well. I was particularly interested in this assignment because one of the reasons I got into computer science was that I was really interested in video games. Although this was a really basic video game, I enjoyed being able to experience the process behind it. One thing that I definitely learned from this assignment was just how much effort had to go into all of the little details, like style checking, and docstrings (something that has always been the bane of my existence). Thank god I had other group members with me, I think I would have gone crazy if I had tried to do all that by myself.
Week #5 was pretty crazy, because I had, in addition to my CSC test, a Political Science paper due and an English test on the same day! Combined with an appointment I had on Thursday that forced me to miss my tutorial, not a lot of time this week for this class in particular. Luckily, I think I already had a pretty good understanding of Stacks and Queues from previous experience. It was definitely a good refresher though, doing the lab on my own time.
Week #6 was the beginning of our work with Trees which was definitely a really interesting aspect of recursion, and will probably from a lot of food for thought for next week's SLOG. Watching everyone walk around and recreate the tree in real life was a really good way for helping to understand it. This lab this week was pretty fun as well, except for a weird error I had when trying to use Gather_lists on lists that contained multiple nested lists with different depths. Although I got closer to a solution, I wasn't able to actually solve the problem entirely, which is something to work on for next time!
Thursday, February 19, 2015
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
Week #3 - Why Geeks Should Write
For too long there has been a stereotyped perception of geeks as people who spend all day indoors, on their computers, playing video games, and not fully participating in the rest of society due to their lack of social skills. While that stereotype as a whole is not one that I can effectively dismantle in a single blog post, one aspect of it is very relevant to the question of why geeks should write. Specifically, the stigma that "geeks" are incompatible with the rest of society stems from the idea that geeks are not able to communicate in the way that other people are. This stigma extends into writing, as a form of communication.
Computer science as a field of study and a profession has been perceived by the rest of society as being largely populated by these "geeks". Unfortunately, this means that people have a different set of assumptions of a computer scientists ability to communicate and socialize with the rest of society, and this makes it all the more important that that stereotype is shattered.
This is especially important in this specific field of study and profession. Computer science and computer programming deals with concepts in fundamentally different ways, often through different languages. Having to express these concepts in multiple languages is difficult to do without having practiced writing skills already, particularly when trying to explain complicated technical ideas with relatively simple language and a lack of computer-science jargon.
It is also true that the field of computer science extends beyond just having to write code. Even within code, a docstring needs to be written in the English (or otherwise) language. Outside of coding itself, research grants, job applications, papers, advertisement, or even just communication with coworkers and employees all require a firm grasp of the English language and being able to use it with precision.
A lot of these reasons for geeks writing are things that can be applied to any person or any field. Many fields have complicated jargon that requires someone with good writing skills to explain to a layman. Many jobs require communication with coworkers and other such examples of writing as outlined above. But combined with the average person's need to write properly is a stereotype that we, as geeks, as computer scientists do need to combat until it is gone entirely.
Computer science as a field of study and a profession has been perceived by the rest of society as being largely populated by these "geeks". Unfortunately, this means that people have a different set of assumptions of a computer scientists ability to communicate and socialize with the rest of society, and this makes it all the more important that that stereotype is shattered.
This is especially important in this specific field of study and profession. Computer science and computer programming deals with concepts in fundamentally different ways, often through different languages. Having to express these concepts in multiple languages is difficult to do without having practiced writing skills already, particularly when trying to explain complicated technical ideas with relatively simple language and a lack of computer-science jargon.
It is also true that the field of computer science extends beyond just having to write code. Even within code, a docstring needs to be written in the English (or otherwise) language. Outside of coding itself, research grants, job applications, papers, advertisement, or even just communication with coworkers and employees all require a firm grasp of the English language and being able to use it with precision.
A lot of these reasons for geeks writing are things that can be applied to any person or any field. Many fields have complicated jargon that requires someone with good writing skills to explain to a layman. Many jobs require communication with coworkers and other such examples of writing as outlined above. But combined with the average person's need to write properly is a stereotype that we, as geeks, as computer scientists do need to combat until it is gone entirely.
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