week 4

How time flies. It is already the 4^th week of our object-oriented programming.

After attending the three lectures this week, I am confident say that I am accustomed to the teaching here.

In the first lecture, the professor continued to talk about exceptions, while in the third lecture, he talked about types, interfaces and classes. Of course, with the assignment of project 2, we also spent one lecture discussing what the problem is and some ideas about to how to solve this problem straightforward and then in a better way. The instruction is very important for us and makes us be aware of the pipeline of our work.

In the week’s passage, I would talk more about why I say I am feeling much better than before.

First of all, I realized that most students in this class learned Java before. It is not meaningful to spend too much discussing basic data types or syntax such as what is IF/ELSE. As a result, my concern that why the professor skipped such section during my first three weeks is gone now.

Second, when we talked about a new topic, the professor will also show Java version to us first. It helps us to get familiar with what the problem is. We could also brush up our Java skills. For example, I really forgot some details of interfaces implementation in Java before Friday’s lecture. After Java code, we will be shown C plus plus version. In this way, even though we may not understand exactly every sentence of the code, we could make a reasonable guess. Such process is a quite pleasant way to learn something new, especially something hard to understand. Another benefit is a direct comparison between Java and C plus plus helps student to strengthen their understanding of both languages, and more important, the understanding of object-oriented programming.

Last but not least, I realized asking and answering is really an effective way for knowledge transfer. It pushes all students to concentrate on the topic and think out for the solution actively because the professor’s question is context-based. It you happen to miss one question and discussion about it, you will probably find it hard to catch up the following. What’s more, such topics will appear in quizzes of next lectures. So listening carefully and thinking actively is a best way in class.