Week 1: Jan 7- Jan 16

First of all. The most frustrating thing for me right off the bat is I really wish the professor stopped giving out his lecture notes in .pdf format. I cannot edit or comment on them during class and many of the "free" .pdf editors require a sign up, a subscription, internet access at all times etc. Could we at least be provided with the name/version of the software he uses annotate them during lecture?

This week has been fairly hectic. I'm still trying to get a feel for the course as we've only had 4 classes since the beginning of the semester. I don't feel that an actual "lesson" occurred until this Monday simply because the course is so much different than csc148 and I'm finding it hard to understand what the purpose of the course is as well as the subject material. Right now I'm not seeing how this course relates much to regular computer science courses and I definitely don't see how this helps me with math. If anything it just makes me more confused. :S

Other than that, I enjoy lecture; the professor has an engaging way of providing information through small notes and descriptions. He also asks and takes class questions which is commendable as it makes me more engaged and helps me understand things more. I also like his use of simple yet solid examples to understand the harder topics so far.

The Venn diagrams he uses helps me a lot more to visualize and think over things. I am having difficulties with the proof sentences that include symbols such as "for all" and "there exists." I understand existential claims and universal claims. However I'm unsure how (if at all) that relates to jumble of symbols that make up the proofs in lecture.  I'm also unaware if we needed to use these symbols for the quiz this week as we didn't seem to use them when we did the lab handout.

On that note I enjoyed my tutorial. The class size is optimal and I found it much easier to get help on concepts from the TA or those around me. I also liked how we took up the answers to the questions we were given unlike (for example) the csc148 tutorials where we're overloaded on work and we don't ever take it up. I hope we can continue this format in the future.

Overall, I am a bit anxious as to how this course will progress. For now I understand the basics simply because we are working with very few lines of code or, in some cases, no code at all. In that respect I can view it as a simpler math word problem (where one is given sentences and is expected to return sentences) rather than a whole chunk of complicated code that needs to be analyzed and translated into English, only to have it rewritten as code.