This is going to be a very short post. I’m sad to say that I studied less this week than in any of the 363 weeks leading up to this point. 😒 I’m guessing I spent less than two hours studying CS. It’s not a good excuse, but once again had a very busy week which definitely was factor. I’ve also been spending a LOT of time thinking about CodaKaizen and how I could set it up as a program for Grade 12 students heading into university. A good chunk of my time this week was spent researching the idea and starting to get feedback from friends and university students I know through the club I work at. And also, one other major thing I decided — and by “decided” I mean that I’m 95% sure — is that I’m not going to continue studying CS once I finish this course and am going to switch over into the English Language Arts section of KA. This is obviously a pretty big pivot given how certain I was that I wanted to learn Python, but I think it’s the better option for me for the time being. I’ll explain more at the end of this post, but to sum this up, it was a pretty disappointing and stressful week, but I’m also excited about what could be coming next. 

I only made it through one challenge, one video, and one article this week. 👎🏼 Here are the notes I made on the challenge and article:

Unit 7 – Building Software with Classes

Lesson 3 – Class Design

Challenge: Elevator Dispatch

This challenge wasn’t too hard, although I did struggle with it a bit. The main reason why I struggled was because I kept starting it but would stop after five minutes and then would have to spend 10 minutes remembering what was going on the next time I restarted it. Once I got going, I got the first three steps on my own but then needed Gemini’s help to get the fourth step. I was also so far behind in studying CS when I finished it (on Friday) that I decided not to bother doing the bonus step and just move straight on to Lesson 4.

Lesson 4 – Composition

Article – Composition Design Patterns

Before starting this article, I watched a video where Kim explained something called “object composition” but I didn’t make notes on. This article went into more detail about object composition which, as far as I understand it, is simply when an object uses/contains another object within it.

The screenshots above are from the first mini exercise/example that was shown in the article. It’s hard to tell, but the object “scam” in main.py uses the object “john” (which you can see as one of scam’s parameter’s on line 6), and looking at the second screenshot above, you can see that the object john gets used as an attribute in the __init__ method under the attribute self.sender (line 5).

The second part of this article gave an example of setting up a class, mainbox.py, to act as a “container” of objects (the objects being emails). It then explained that the benefit of structuring the data this way is that you can then change the email class without affecting how the mailbox object stores emails.

The final part of the article gave an example of setting up a class to be used IN another class, giving the example of setting up a spam_filter class that gets used inside mailbox.py. The mailbox object sets spam_filter as an attribute (line 8 in the first screenshot above) and then calls it when receiving an email with .recieved() (line 23 in the first screenshot above). The spam_filter class checks each email for blocked terms (line 5 in the second screenshot above) and if the email contains a blocked term, that email gets marked as spam back in mailbox.py and doesn’t get appended to the inbox list.

I found this entire article pretty tricky to follow but do think I managed to wrap my head around the gist of the main points it was making. However, I was bummed out that I REALLY struggled to follow the flow of variables, methods, objects, etc. between the classes and modules. 😞

And that, unfortunately, was it for this week. Pretty pathetic really… I don’t want to beat myself up too badly because I don’t think that will be helpful, but I’m quite disappointed and disheartened with how this week went. To be fair, at the start I liked the idea of studying and learning Python, but it hasn’t clicked for me the same way that studying math did. I feel like I was WAY more motivated to study math than I have been trying to learn Python. It could be because I simply had stronger intuition for math than I have for Python, but I honestly think that it has more to do with the fact that I don’t find computer programming interesting… I like the idea of becoming a programmer (mainly just because I know you can make a lot of money as a programmer), but in practice, I don’t really enjoy it. For this reason, I’m REALLY hoping I will enjoy working through the English Language Arts (ELA) side of Khan Academy after this.

One of the reasons why I want to switch into ELA is because recently I realized that I want to start writing again. More specifically, I want to write a few essays on education, how it’s changing, and how employment will change because education is changing. I want to write more so that I can improve my communication skills and because I want to learn more about certain topics—education being one of them. If it’s true that working through this side of KA will help me improve my communication skills, I think that would give me a solid ROI in general, but it would also help me articulate what I’m trying to do with CodaKaizen which could be very helpful. At the least, I think I’ll find it more interesting and more practically useful than CS.

Funny enough, all I have left to do in Intro to Computer Science – Python is one exercise, one video, one challenge, one article, and one project. Given the pace I’ve been going lately, that’s not a small amount of material left for me to get through, but I do think it’s possible for me to get through it all by the end of this week. I also really want to finish it all off by the end of this week because the following week, Week 366, will be the start of my eighth year writing Solve For Why and working on Khan Academy. There’d be something very satisfying about finishing off the Intro to Computer Science – Python course and starting on the ELA section of Khan Academy at the start of this upcoming year! So, as always, fingers crossed I can have a productive week and actually make it happen! 🤞🏼