One More Lab to Go!

Thinking today about how CSC148 is coming to a close, I realized that the lab I was about to do (the one I did this morning) was the second last lab of the entire course. It made me a little sad because I enjoyed the labs and the course, but I noticed a wise way in which the course and its grading system had been structured.

I recently met with my Linear Algebra course's coordinator to learn how to write proofs better. He said it was a difficult technique for most people to master and usually required a few months of exposure to them. For that purpose, in the continuation (MAT224) of my current Linear Algebra course (MAT223), he said he would give proof assignments that would be automatically graded as 100% upon submission and then reviewed to give feedback. This way, students could develop the skill of proving without the pressure of having to do well.

This is exactly what has been done with our labs; we are simply given the mark based on participation, not progress, so the stress of being graded is removed. In such a way, the labs are instead focused on teamwork, understanding code and concepts, discussions, and asking questions to gain clarification.

Having the lab component of the course has really helped me nail down, solidify, and practice some of the things taught in class. Although today's lab was not as intense from a programming perspective, it really helped me understand algorithm efficiency by tweaking, testing, and talking about various sorting methods.

Perhaps the best part about the ease of today's lab was my partner's suggestion to test bogosort. This shuffles a list until it is in sorted order, and actually isn't the worst sort out there (look up bogobogosort if you're interested). My partner, our TA, and I all had a good laugh at the fact that, when bogosorting 10 elements, we were able to do some homework and check back to find no progress had been made. It actually took 35 minutes to sort the 10-item list, so I think Python should consider tossing Timsort and implementing bogosort as its built-in function instead, in all seriousness. ;)