Week 1: Beginning of CSC165

To be honest, first day back at UofT after a long winter break hibernating in my soft and comfortable bed at home made me feel a little nervous. Knowing that I will be starting a new course that I heard from other students to be extremely challenging. However all those nervous feelings start to disappear or dissolve over the first week, making it easier to get more focused throughout the rest of the winter session.

I definitely found the introduction lecture of CSC165 to be very helpful because it gave a lot more insight about the course and why we should even consider taking it as computer scientists:

What is CSC165?

• A course about expression and communication

Which is definitely helpful for reading other people's program, understanding developers and understanding yourself when you communicate with others.

Why CSC165? 

• memorize math ===> Sort of or Only some theorems
• have trouble explaining what your doing in technical work ===> Yes
• have trouble understanding word problems ===> Definitely

All of these questions have made me realize that I definitely need this course more than I thought.

Topics We Went Over

We also looked at a couple of topics to introduce us into the course such as the double meaning. This topic was to help us understand the meaning of ambiguity and how it can lead to a lot of misunderstanding between  people trying to write statements that can specify what a program does. I would have to agree that understanding the specifications of a program is a common problem among computer scientists which makes this course very important for these situations.We went over the properties of a set and how it differs from a list.We also started on quantifications at the end of the week to help us determine the difference between a universal and existential claim/quantification.

Final Thoughts and Advice

So far the course seems interesting and helpful in specified and clear communication strategies. The only helpful advice right at this moment in the course is make sure that you read and understand the Chapter 1: Introduction in the course note link, located on the course website. You will definitely need it for future lessons. Good Luck to everyone.