First and Second Week (September 8 - 19)

These weeks were my first two weeks of CSC165H1, or of any course, for that matter. And while I was a little stressed out about lectures, especially given the fact that I missed a couple of lectures as I was wait-listed on ROSI, I found it very easy and stress-free to adapt. I guess I have to give a lot of credit to my instructor, Danny Heap, for making the lectures so exciting. He is always upbeat and makes the class very enjoyable. What I also like about his method of teaching is that he always explains every topic very thoroughly and provides a lot of examples to help understand and remember that topic. As well, every question that I - or any of my fellow classmates - have are immediately taken up and answered with absolute clarity.

So far, I am extremely satisfied with the course. It covers material similar to some other courses I am also taking (MAT137Y1), but it provides more in-depth definitions and relates it to computer programming. As well, this course is also acting as a refresher of Python syntax, which I haven't used for some time.

The one problem that I really enjoyed solving this week was figuring out the ages of the 3 kids given the facts that the ages multiply to give 36, their sum is not unique, and that the eldest person plays piano. It didn't take me long to figure out the two possibilities (9, 2, 2 or 6, 6, 1) that might meet the first two conditions, so the answer - 9, 2, 2 - was pretty obvious. I liked this example because it involved logical thinking to get to the answer. Besides, it was also cool to use the new notation to outline the problem first, making sure to indicate all the given and required variables, and then coming up with multiple methods to find the solution.

As well, a lot of attention was paid to quantifiers, implications, converse, and negation throughout the lectures. And while for some people it may be easier to use mental Venn diagrams, I also found it more helpful to reword the question first, and then see how to prove it wrong (when using negation). For example, take question 1 d) from tutorial exercise #1, "some of the three python programs don't pass all three test suites." To negate this sentence, I first change it to "not all programs pass all three test suites", and then just get rid of the "not", thus getting the following negating sentence - "all programs pass all three tests." EDIT: As I learned today, this technique is actually called 'contrapositive,' and not 'negation,' but the idea is the same - it toggles the truth value of the statement.

Overall, I am very happy with my experience with CSC165H1 so far, and I am looking forward to my future lectures!