One of the most important things I took away from the first few weeks of CSC148 was how to actually create programs. In CSC108, our assignments always involved creating functions, which were then used by the provided code. The functions had to do exactly what the assignment described, so the whole process did not feel very creative, and in general it just felt like solving math problems. Even in high school programming we got to make games right off the bat, and as a result I have a whole bunch of files that I can run and start playing. CSC108 has left me with some essentially useless programs. They are useless because they are not implemented into anything, for example, what's the point of a tweet analyzer if it doesn't include a way to extract the tweets from the web? Of course while they are just exercises rather than anything useful in themselves, it sure would make it more fun if we end up with something that can be used.
But now we get to the fun stuff, starting with Assignment 1. We've learned how to make classes interact and build off each other and we know how to write the necessary functions, so now we've used that to create something useful, a video game. Subtract Square is a riveting single player experience where the player must use his mathematical capabilities to... Okay it's not that fun, but it's something. It's a program that I can open, and immediately be playing a game. This is what computer science is about, making programs, programs that do stuff. And maybe my computer player for Assignment 1 will start to learn, and achieve consciousness, and do my assignments for me. Or start the robot apocalypse. I'll be proud of it either way.
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