CS Online Learning Journal

Who did you work with? I worked with my classmates Vance Thrasher, Robert Stanford and Anwar Siddiqui.  What was your strategy for solving the Markov assignment? Did you start writing code right away? Did you plan it out on paper? My strategy for solving the Markov assignment began with carefully reading the prompt to gain a thorough understanding of the program's requirements. Next, I reviewed the UML diagram to grasp the structure, methods, and fields involved in the program. With this understanding in place, I proceeded to implement the program, following the guidelines outlined in the UML diagram. Throughout the process, I engaged in debugging to resolve any issues and ensure the program functioned correctly.  What was their strategy for solving the Markov assignment? Their strategy was similar to mine. Their approach was to follow the methods provided in the prompt, reading in lines from the file, then splitting the lines into words, and adding those words to the HashM...

For this week's CST-338 class, our focus was to review one of our classmate's Jotto code. I collaborated with Vance Thrasher, who provided valuable feedback on my implementation. The feedback I received about my code was positive, highlighting its well structured organization and effective implementation of key functionalities such as reading words from a file, playing the game, updating word lists, picking words, and handling user guesses. Suggestions for improvement included avoiding recursive calls in the `pickWord()` method to prevent potential stack overflow errors and adding input validation in the `guess()` method to ensure user-entered guesses are valid. Reflecting on the unit tests, I found that while they covered the full range of Jotto functionality, there were challenges, particularly in passing the `addBadLine` test due to unintended side effects of code modifications. Despite these challenges, I am proud of successfully passing all the tests, especially considerin...

  For this week’s CST-388 class, our focus was on programming a Jotto game. If you're unfamiliar with Jotto, it's a word guessing game where the player tries to guess a randomly selected word from a list of five-letter words within six attempts. This assignment marked my first deep dive into a substantial programming project, which proved to be quite challenging. The program we developed involved implementing getters, setters, and additional methods to facilitate gameplay. Working on these methods took up a significant amount of time, especially as I struggled with getting them to function as intended. Testing our code with the provided JottoTest.java file introduced an additional layer of complexity. One particularly challenging aspect was the pickWord() method, which caused the test to enter an infinite loop. Despite the program running smoothly in the Drive file, debugging this issue took considerable effort. After identifying and resolving the bug, I revisited the program a...

CodingBat Java: For this week's CST-388 class, we had to complete two sets of CodingBat exercises. The first set was particularly challenging for me since I haven't coded in over a year. However, the second set, focusing on "String-2" problems, proved to be even more difficult than the first. Each set took me over 45 minutes to complete, with the second set taking significantly longer. To tackle these challenges, I began by refreshing my memory and watching some YouTube tutorials. I carefully read the prompts and examined the provided examples to understand the expected output. After taking some time to ponder the solutions, I started writing code and submitted it to see if it worked. If the solution failed to meet the requirements, I analyzed the failed tests and modified the code accordingly. On average, the more difficult problems required around five attempts before finding a solution, while the easier ones typically only took one or two tries. Overall, this exper...