UIT2201: Lecture 1 (Week 1)

This semester, I was a little surprised my class size was bigger than usual (almost double that of last year)*. I had prepared a roster on Friday with 25 students, but on Monday morning, that went up to 30!

In this first lecture, I want to set the tone, to get people comfortable with each other and me and to start asking questions. It was useful that one of the students, Tomithy, added in a post in the forum to get things going. As of now, we already have an interesting thread going on the issue of "iteration vs recursion"!! (woW!)
The first lecture went well, it was also good that in the UIT2201 Alum FB group, various people have put up their personal reflections (and some photos)! I am excited with the class and I hope the students are equally excited too.

One of the photos (from Juliana) on the FB group is of the 9-ring puzzle and so I brought the 9-ring puzzle to class. At least one student has solved it before. I promised to buy the whole class coffee if by the end of the semester, at least half the class knows how to solve it! This will be a massive coffee award.

Over the past month or so, I thought about using Scratch as the common platform for algorithm demo and for student projects. It was only last week that it was finally decided that, "Yes", we will go with Scratch. So, over the weekend, we (me and a secret helper friend) worked on sample Scratch code to demo the algorithm in Week 1 lecture notes. We had a meeting yesterday and talked about other Scratch features (and also features that are not directly supported). It appears Scratch will be a good platform. I was glad that when I show the Scratch homepage, the first audibles that came from the class was "cute".

I did not cover as much as I wanted to, but it was a good first class and I think the people have warmed up and are feeling comfortable, at least the vibes are good. There were healthy questions and discussions. My FB status update after the lectures was: [[ ...UIT2201 first lecture today. People asked about 9-ring puzzle, about recursion, about mini languages (with few primitives). Actually, the 3-things are intimately related to each other, even though these questions came from different parts of the lecture!!! "There are only 2 primitives in 9-ring puzzle, and to solve it we keep applying two recursive procedures!" Great, love it. ]]

Regards, --hon-wai
* upon further checks, it was partly due to reduced supply (fewer modules on offer during the semester).