Semester Reflections (Optional)

Due: 11:59 PM on Monday, May 3
I can accept late work through the end of Reading Period (Saturday May 8) with no late penalty

Recap

Congratulations on finishing the spring semester! You have learned a lot about computer science and completed many assignments; you should be very proud of all that you have done this semester. This includes learning about:

  1. Algorithmic Thinking: how to analyze a problem, develop a set of steps to successfully solve the problem as an algorithm, then translate your algorithm into a language that a computer understands so it can use your algorithm during problem solving
  2. Programming Building Blocks: the fundamental building blocks used to construct programs out of our algorithms, including variables and data, for and while loops, if statement conditionals, functions, data collections (lists, dictionaries, sets, tuples, files), and modules
  3. Iteration and Recursion: two perspectives for designing algorithms, including a bottom-up approach of building up a solution from scratch using loops (iteration) and a top-down approach of repeatedly making a problem smaller until we arrive at a simple case for which we already know the solution (recursion)
  4. Algorthmic Analysis: being able to look at algorithms and compare their performance, including what kinds of work they need to do and how much time they might take to run (order notation), without having to run them on a computer
  5. Object-Oriented Programming: designing representations (classes) of real-world entities in our computer programs that have their own properties (instance variables) and can take actions (methods), including interacting with one another

Your Reflections

In this activity, you have the opportunity to reflect on your own experiences and connections with computer science. This activity is completely optional; you can complete it to earn back credit you might have missed on the other reflections during the course of the semester (or earn a small amount of bonus points, if you haven't missed any reflections). In particular, it will replace your two lowest scoring reflections.

For this assignment, you should answer the following questions in a typed (not handwritten) document (e.g., using Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, Google Docs), and your total reflection should be at least 500 words (about a single spaced page):

  1. What did you learn this semester? How have your thoughts about and knowledge of computer science changed over the semester?

  2. How do you see what you learned in class being useful to you in the future?

  3. Did you gain the knowledge and skills you were wanting to gain when you started the class? What did we do that was useful to your learning? What do you wish we had covered or done that we did not?

When finished, please save your document as a PDF and upload it to Gradescope under the assignment "Semester Reflections". At the end of your document, please indicate that you have followed the honor code on this assignment by writing:

I have adhered to the Honor Code in this assignment.