Journal Entry - Week 1 (CST 338)

 

Discuss the process of solving the Coding Bat challenges.  A major part of software design is thinking about how to approach a problem with the tools we have at our disposal.  What were the steps you took to solve some of these challenges? 

When I solved the Coding Bat challenges, I recalled a lot of the material that I learned during AP Computer Science in high school which also uses Java. I approached the problems by using logic, experience, and trying to simplify code as much as possible such as omitting else statements if possible.


Did you plan it out or throw code at it? 

What worked?

What DID NOT work?

How many tries did it take? 


I planned my code out when possible, only submitting once I was confident that it’d be correct. I treated Coding Bat like a game where I intended to make as few mistakes as possible. For me, what worked was going through each problem with logic in mind, and ensuring each semicolon was present (something I had to pick up again after using Python for a while). What did not work was brute forcing code. I felt that writing code and correcting a mistake at a time was inefficient. For me, I was able to finish most problems in my first try as I have prior experience with Java.

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