As Salamu Alaykum Wa Rahmatullahi Wa Barakatuh World!
Day 3 was quite a hectic one. A 1pm start with a 1 hour lecture on Programming Practice and Applications followed by an hour’s break and finally, the 3 hour introductory lecture on Foundations of Computing.
A quick side note on lectures, usually the timetable states
there’s X lecture at Y room followed by Z tutorial in room Y. Everyone simply
assumes it’s just a 3 hour lecture when it’s actually a 2 hour lecture
immediately followed by a 1 hour tutorial in the same room where you can ask
questions and whatnot
.
So, in actuality the entire session is only 2 hours long and
the optional tutorial is of course, optional. If you’ve understood the lecture
and haven’t dozed off then great, you have no need to attend the tutorial.
However, if you’re sitting throughout the entire lecture completely clueless
about what is transpiring then it’s probably a good idea to use the tutorials
for additional support.
Anyway, the first lecture at 1pm was quite interesting.
Being introduced to a new IDE (BlueJ) which most people had never encountered
before in a thorough way was a great method to get everyone to familiarise
themselves with it (especially since a lot of students on the course have no
programming background whatsoever).
The hectic part of the day came during the hour break, where
a paced walk towards collecting the required Arduino kit for practicals was a
confusing one indeed. Route planning between buildings is essential if you want
to get to classes on time. On top of that, I made the rookie error of the year
by forgetting my ID card so accessing buildings became very annoying as I had
to sign in every time. A mistake I shall never be making again InShaAllah.
Oh and here’s a bright idea. Don’t waste your phone battery
on meaningless activities while travelling to university since I can guarantee
from experience that 90% of the time it will die on the way home. An
alternative (and costly) solution is to get a power bank but I’d rather utilise
the former means of maximising my battery life.
For the last part of the day, the intro lecture on
Foundations of Computing, the lecturer was kind of difficult to understand to
say the least but I expect this is common at every uni so I digress. Again, the
content was very repetitive and similar to A level content so it was very easy
to get distracted. Occasionally there was something new but on the whole, it
was pretty elementary.
Again (not that I’m complaining), the lecture finished
rather early (4:40 if memory serves) so you could either leave or wait for the
tutorial and obviously I chose the former. That’s all for today, be sure to
check out day 4’s blog coming up next.
Hope this helps!
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