First CSC104 blog

Before going into my first year of university life, some of my friends that studied at UofT told me about CSC104. They told me about how interesting CSC104 was and how doing CSC104's practice gave them a chance to learn something cool and useful. And now, here I am, taking CSC104 for my first year of university. Through this course, I really hope to get to know more about coding, and actually be familiar with it. For example, creating my own games using codes, and drawing a fantasy picture using codes.
Throwing back to the first time that I programmed was when I was in Grade 11.  I did a computer science course for a semester. But instead of programming using DrRacket, we used Java, which I found somewhat similar to DrRacket. There are still differences. The several differences that I found were that, when using Java, if I just typed in a word, like "morning", there would be an error. While using DrRacket, I typed in "morning" and hit enter, the word "morning" would be displayed. Also, there was also a difference when doing calculations. When using DrRacket, I needed to type in the symbol ("+", "-", "*", "/"...)before any numbers, while using Jave, we typed the sign after the number when we needed it. There are definitely more differences between Java and DrRacket. After studying DrRacket for about a month, I found the function "rotate" the most interesting.
Before I learned about any rotation, I thought it would be a rotation of 45 degrees clockwise when I saw the function "rotate 45" . But surprisingly, it rotated counter-clockwise 45 degrees. What it showed to me was that not all the codes follow common sense, there were some special ones.
I didn't find many difficulties while learning how to use DrRacket as our professor explained the functions through multiple examples and we could also reread about them after class on our class website. I think the course is neither harder or easier than my expectation. Before the quizzes, I studied for them through trying through the examples given by our professor and doing the quiz practices on DrDracket. I believe I did well on my first quiz, I'm not quite satisfied with my performance on my second quizzes. I did not do quite well on my very last question on the second quiz, the first reason was that I felt that way was because I did not have enough time to read through the last question carefully; the second reason was that I wasn't doing enough practices to prepare for the quiz. In order to do better on my next quiz, I'm planning to do more practices before the quiz, to get myself ready for any kind of question. On my next quiz, I would try to read through the question fast and carefully.
Talking about some specific Computer Science topics that I'm interested in would be creating an online shopping website and creating a game, that people can actually press buttons and play with it. I wish I could do that at the end of this term.