It’s for the best that this will be my last week studying CS because it was once again another pitiful effort on my part. 👎🏼 I did manage to get through Unit 7 and therefore finish off Intro to Computer Science – Python, but not in the way I would have liked. I ended up using Gemini to help me do the challenge and project, and by that I mean it ended up doing most of the coding I was asked to write… I’ll talk more about it at the end of this post, but I definitely fell out of love with programming over the past few weeks. I’m disappointed but also relieved to be done with CS. I’m also excited (although feeling slightly tentative) about starting the English Language Arts side of Khan Academy. So all in all, I’m feeling a mixture of emotions right now but genuinely think it’s for the best that this will be my last week studying CS. Overall, I think it was worthwhile for me to have worked through the course and to have at least attempted to learn CS, but I genuinely believe that I’ll get a higher ROI working though ELA. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!
Here are the final few things I made notes on this week from this course:
Unit 7 – Building Software with Classes
Lesson 4 – Composition
Exercise – Compose Objects
Question 1
This was the first question I was given in the exercise and I got it correct but had no idea what I was doing. It took me a few minutes reading through KA’s explanation before I understood how the titles flowed through the classes and into the attribute.
Question 2
After being pretty confused on the first question, I read this question and without looking at the solutions said, “it would be cell.battery.level” which was correct. It was definitely a relief to get the right solution without looking at the answers and made me happy that I’ve at least learned some things working through this course. 😮💨
Video – Program Design: Real Estate
In this video, Kim showed how object composition could work using the example of listing a house, its respective rooms, and their respective features (such as type, square footage, and floor level) on a database. The screenshots above were from code that I wrote out in my own IDE as I followed along with what Kim was writing in the video.
I do find object composition a bit confusing, but I think I’m starting to get the hang of it, at least conceptually. Writing out the code with Kim and then pausing the video to stop and try to understand how the objects, their attributes, and their methods got called between classes and modules (if that makes sense) was helpful but also challenging and somewhat frustrating. Nonetheless, I definitely found writing/copying Kim’s code helpful to get a better grasp on object composition.
Challenge: Library Catalog
I spent a bit of time trying to think through the first step of this challenge but couldn’t figure it out so got Gemini to help me. (And by “help” I mean it coded the solution for me 😒). After that, I was even more confused by the second and third steps so, again, I asked Gemini for “help” and didn’t work through any of the code on my own… At that point, I basically knew that I wasn’t going to continue studying Python/CS so I wasn’t too bothered about trying to learn how this type of coding works. (Although I was still very disappointed about getting Gemini to give me the answer. 😔)
Lesson 5 – Programming Robots
Project: Paint Battle
This project was completely out of my depth. I stared at the code in each of the modules for about 45 minutes trying to understand how the classes, methods, and everything else all worked together, then realized I wasn’t going to be able to figure it out and so I asked Gemini to write the code for me… The only silver lining was that I can sort of follow and understand the code that Gemini came up with which you can see in the last screen shot above in the pick_move function. It’s definitely not much of a win, but it’s better than nothing and I’m certain I wouldn’t have had a clue how any of the code Gemini wrote worked a few months ago.
And that was it for this week and for CS. 😮💨 Like I said, it’s not the way I wanted to finish CS, but it’s definitely a relief. And like I also said, I’m genuinely excited to get started on the ELA section of KA. Looking at the section as a whole, these screenshots show the progression of the courses and the titled of the units in each course:
My plan was to start at the beginning and just work through them chronologically, except I just opened up the first article and video in the first unit (4th Grade Reading and Vocab) and it seems way to simple… The article and video go through a few definitions of words like “ability”, “heroic”, and “villain”. When I did math, I skipped most of the arithmetic course and jumped straight ahead to pre-algebra. I’m wondering if I should use that type of strategy with ELA, skipping ahead to more difficult courses. I think my plan of attack will be to spend a bit of time on Tuesday reading the descriptions of each course and their unit’s articles and videos to get a better idea of where a good place to start would be. Hopefully by next week I’ll know how I want to go about working through the ELA side of KA.
So, as always, fingers crossed I can have a productive upcoming week — and a productive start to YEAR 8 (😳) which I somehow forgot to mention!! — so that I can be a bit more excited about working through KA than I have been over the past few weeks. 🤞🏼 I miss being excited about learning in the same way I was when I was studying math, so my fingers are crossed a bit tighter this week than usual!