Quantity is Quality (sometimes)

Yesterday's and today's class have been mostly devoted towards reviewing some fundamentals since I'd sensed a weakness in quite a few students. I'm going to continue with that tomorrow and, aside from some notes on documenting methods, am not planning on introducing any more new material this week. I think the fundamental weakness is that the class hasn't written enough code for the basic constructs to be at your fingertips. Once you've written a hundred for loops you won't be struggling with how to put one together anymore.

Quantity is (can lead to?) quality. It's like martial arts. You practice the same move over and over and over again. You do the same thing a thousand, two thousand times. The point? To insert the moves into your nervous system. To make this artificial sequence of moves something that you do automatically, instinctively. Once you reach that level of integration then you can start improvising with the moves and do creative things with them.

Computer Science, then, as a form of mental karate.

The other big challenge that a lot of students are facing right now has to do with the difficulty of translating the requirements laid out in the review exercises into a solution implemented in the code. It's like word problems in math. You have to keep practicing the process of turning the descriptions into java code. How do you this if you don't already know how to do it? That's the sixty-four thousand dollar question.

One part of the answer is to write some *&(@#$ stuff down. The program description contain pieces of the puzzle you have to put together. Get them out of your head (where they reside after you read the problem) and onto some paper so you can look at them.

Another part of the answer is to do lots of them. Again, practice is going to lead you in the right direction. Every problem that you successfully solve is an approach that enters your repertoire and that you then have available for re-use down the road.