week 6

After the first month’s experience, I decide to change something during the lecture. That is to print code that will be discussed in class in advance. My intent is to make it easier for me to write down my notes within enough context so that I could review it in the future.

Before this week, I came to class with no preparation and only wrote down something randomly in a paper. The result is when I want to go back and review them, some paper is missing and some remaining is hard to understand because I could not fully note what I was thinking then.

As a result, I print the code in advance this week and have a try. I find it really works. First of all, I am more willing to note something near the code. You can regard the code as foundation and I just need to add some comments. That could save a lot of time comparing to write notes in a paper. When I want to prepare for a quiz and take a look at last lecture’s note, it is shown to be effective and I could easily remember what was discussed and what was the trick there.  One minor disadvantage of such way is that I wrote down more notes and sometimes I would miss what the professor is talking. He spoke too fast for a foreign student sometimes.

I will keep doing so in the rest of this semester.

This week we discussed some topics that are fairly tricky and confusing, to some extent. The most impressive topic for me, is arrays in Java and C plus plus. Before taking the lecture, I only know how to create an array. But now I understand the inner mechanism of array in both Java and C++ such as where the array will be stored, what is exactly in the array, references, pointers or objects, and how to pass array as an argument to other methods. The feeling is great because you really understand it and even though questions may vary, you could easily answer it. It is quite different from my previous experience that I have to remember many observations and once there is variation, I will make a mistake.

Time to prepare for next week test. Fight!