Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

A Good Start

Yesterday was dead­line day for CS118 Coursework 1 (Java). I got mine fin­ished on Sunday night, and sub­mit­ted with the nifty online system.

The course­work centred around the Warwick Maze envir­on­ment, which provides a graph­ical maze and the hooks needed to inter­act with it. Our part was to cre­ate a series of increas­ingly com­plex con­trol­ler mod­ules for the robot.

The mark­ing method was refresh­ingly per­sonal — once I showed up at my allot­ted slot, I sat down with one of the post­grad tutors, and we went through each exer­cise in the course­work. He looked through my code; I told him why I’d done cer­tain things the way I had, and how the com­plic­ated bits worked. Then he ticked off vari­ous cri­teria on his mark­ing sheet. It took about 5 minutes in total, and I ended up with 135/135 :-D. This after get­ting soaked in the rain, and hav­ing major PC trouble (which will be covered in another post :-)), it was an upshot to a day that star­ted poorly.