Rambling of a Coder

Build Blocks Course nearing end

Wednesday 21 April 2010 at 4:14 pm

So, Latest course is coming to an end finally. One more TMA to go and then the final Exam, which they have kindly agreed i can sit at home. Then that’s it

TMA due on 20th May, Final exam 7th of June. So plenty of time for both, especially as I've already started the TMA and have all the old exam papers for the final exam to study with.
I didn’t quite get the courses explanations and expectations of Boolean Algebra and its use in Proving X function works. But i got around that easily by quietly ditching the course materials and purchasing both Boolean Algebra and Schaum's Outline of Boolean Algebra and Switching Circuits Both of which combined covered the subject much better than my course materials but also explained things that my course material just seemed to assume that you knew.

I know that my course material was coming at it from a programming view, but they just missed so much out and explained the parts they did explain in such a lazy manner that it actually made the subject more confusing. Worst part was it undermined my own confidence in doing Algebra in any form, which i felt i didn’t have a problem with from my Mathematics courses. But after the materials given that confidence was gone. Not just that though they expected you to grasp the subject from a small explanation and one or two simple examples. Then in the assessments throw you right into more complex problems. Definitely and over-sight in there somewhere! I’ve never really felt that it was bad course materials to this point, Before just bad idea’s or bad implementations. Like making part of your grade dependant on posting X number of points in a group Online discussion.. When maybe 2 people would contribute then the day the paper was due everyone else would showup leaving ZERO time for the group discussions that was intended. This IMO was certainly just a bad idea for a distance learning medium.

Ahh well onwards anyway, Start my next course on May 8th, which should be… well boring to be honest, Its a “compulsory” course which I HAVE to take for my degree. It’s only 12 weeks and is completely online and group based, Can’t say I’m looking forward to it but it will be a change of pace between this course and my next one which is slipping back into 100% mathematics again but at least lets me get back to using one of the Mathematical software packages, Hopefully this time it will be something that runs without having to cludge it in Windows 7, like the last one i did that needed tweaking to get it to work on Vista. Kind of looking forward to getting stuck into a pure programming course again, even if It is Java based.

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