Turtle

The most exciting thing that we did in Comp Sci this week was the Turtle lab, where we had to make the given turtle do various things through programming. The whole process became significantly easier this week for some reason, and I think that I'm starting to get the hang of it. Assigning one turtle to a preexisting one was perhaps the most difficult to wrap my head around, but I looked back to the power-point presentation and eventually remembered that two references can point to the same thing. The act of doing the lab really helps because, if we missed something during the presentation, we can always look back to it and then apply the rules to our work.
Secondly, creating methods was really interesting to me because I could simply make a turtle draw a square without having to retype everything at once. It's almost like a shortcut, and I luckily didn't seem to have any problems with that. All in all, I never expected to be able to create something in Java other than text (although technically, I didn't actually program the Turtle files beforehand). I was surprised that I was able to do something of this magnitude within the first six weeks of school. I think as we move through other topics, I am able to fully grasp concepts that we have covered in the past. For instance, a few weeks back, I didn't fully understand the purpose of a method, but I understand it a little better now. The most important thing to do (for me) is to make sure that I know what I want to accomplish, the steps to accomplish the task, and what coding couples with those steps. Starting a program is always the hardest for me, but hopefully that will change as the course continues.