I came into this class on the first day knowing almost nothing about what this class would be about. I knew I was going to be programming, but not what program I would use. When I learned that we would be learning Python, I got excited because I know how popular Python is in the scientific programming world. I almost took a course in Python when I took COMP 116, but instead I took that course during the semester they were teaching Matlab. Learning Python is definitely going to benefit both my resume and my ability to provide useful skills to research I may do in the future.

As soon as class started I felt pretty comfortable. The environment was open and much less intimidating than the usual 100+ person class I am typically accustomed to. The prospect of having a 1:9 teacher to student ratio is much more reassuring, particularly with a class for programming. My programming experience consists of lots of me googling problems, still running into issues, and then getting frustrated and having to start from scratch. Although the pace went fairly quickly, there were still enough points throughout the first lecture where I had a moment to collect myself and make sure I was caught up with where we were in the lecture.   During lecture we started right off the bat with a list of code that we could use and then a place to code as we please with Tina the Turtle. I personally was comfortable with this, but had I not had any experience with coding I don’t think I would have been so confident in my ability to do anything significant during the time in class. I enjoyed the challenge though to be creative but also figure out how to create something with Python’s basic coding commands.   I found the readings to be easy to understand and useful for engaging with the material, and the exercises we did were appropriate for the readings we had. I did experience some uncertainty with the second part of our exercise because I’m used to making code as general as possible so that any number can be input into the code and it will still run. I don’t think my code was general enough for this because there were some values that were integers and some that were floating values. Hopefully I will figure that out through further readings and lectures.   Overall, I am looking forward to the rest of class and am optimistic of my success.