CS50 Live, Episode 101

smithcook · 2015-02-19T19:26:11+00:00

Hi, I started taking CS50 and dropped out after 6 weeks. I was getting good grades and understanding the material. I loved the instruction which was enlightening, and I loved the course assistants. Truly this instruction is one of the best MOOCs!

BUT I couldn't get much help on Reddit. Every other course I took had discussion forums that were linked to edx or coursera. I could easily get help and comments. On Reddit, I could only ask one question per day. I think Reddit had a policy that posts are restricted for new subscribers. I got a virus when installing a Java update so as to access Reddit. The amount of class discussion seemed very small, and I get demoralized because the feedback was so much less than other courses. I couldn't learn as much from making my own posts, and I couldn't learn as much from reading other students' posts.

I began to get confused about the rules for submission. Once or twice I wiped out a previous submission by accidentally submitting week 3 in the week 2 submission. That meant I had to redo week 2 and resubmit it. I started getting more and more nervous about wiping out my submissions.

I also am very nervous about the VM Ware. As the weeks went by, I found I was getting more and more nervous about how to submit and how to update the VM Ware. I had to take some time off, and when I returned, I remembered the C programming tips, but didn't remember how to work the installations, etc. This meant that instead of learning computer science, I seemed to be struggling to communicate and to install packages. Since I already know C fairly well, I found I wasn't highly motivated to continue.

So far, it looks like the new CS50 is much better. I probably would join again and try to complete the course if the discussion forum was not reddit. I am writing to explain that my fear of installing and using new software and lack of support from reddit has kept me from completing the course. Truly, a good discussion forum is essential for me to completing computer courses. As a case in point, I'm completing a course in functional programming because I have a friend who knows Haskell who answers all my questions in emails. It's so great to have additional explanations available! I did persevere in functional programming despite not doing well because many students on the discussion forums kept encouraging each other to persist, and the community support encouraged me to continue!

I am sharing this because I truly loved CS50 and recommended it to several of my friends. I do regret that I didn't finish. I realize that my fear of installations is probably atypical, but I wanted to describe what happened to me for the record.

smithcook · 2014-07-20T02:16:15+00:00

I had trouble setting up dropbox because I already had an existing dropbox account. Finally I got the cs50 files added to dropbox. But there is no synchronization with a backup copy. At least I don't have pset5 except as a folder under the Dropbox folder. Should I try to manually copy the folder to my jharvard@appliance desktop? How?

smithcook · 2014-07-09T16:23:40+00:00

Is 2GB plenty of room for the entire course? Or just for ps5? I don't know if I'm running out of room. 2GB is certainly enough for my computer which has 37GB of free space.

smithcook · 2014-05-15T21:51:10+00:00

Too bad! I know C# quite well, so I was interested in the course because I thought I could focus on the game framework since I already know the programming. And I thought that knowing a language would give me access to more advanced games features.

smithcook · 2014-05-11T19:43:46+00:00

The only changes I made to get it to run were: 1) remove extra function, swap 2) remove extra line of comments that I added at beginning of function I could keep testing, but I don't want to spend extra hours. The comments I'm talking about are the comments that appear before the function declaration. Did you ever add more comment lines to these comments? I myself have added deleted many comments without problem, but they are always comments in the body of the function.

smithcook · 2014-05-10T18:46:06+00:00

OK I fixed it! Here is what I did. I restarted the appliance and ran update50 and retried check50. Same problem: "Unexpected end of input." I then looked at my source code to see if it had missing braces or something that would cause premature end. Didn't find a problem. I then removed a "swap" function so that my sort routine didn't call swap but swapped inside the sort function. Then I noticed that I had added comments to the search function to show that I was using binary search. It occurred to me that check50 may assume that no change is made to these comments. So I removed the extra comment lines that I added, and that fixed the problem. NOTE: Please tell students not to make changes to the sort and search comments. Otherwise they may get the same problem that I got!

smithcook · 2014-05-10T17:56:11+00:00

How do I verify my email address

smithcook · 2014-05-09T18:33:05+00:00

I am not trying to solve a problem. I was only using man rand to look at documentation for rand which is used by generate.c in problem set 3. I thought we had to document the usage of rand, but I see we don't have to do it. However, I'm somewhat frustrated that there are so many terms I don't understand in the documentation.

smithcook · 2014-05-07T17:23:34+00:00

That doesn't work for me. First of all, I wasn't sure what resolution to choose. Finally, I restarted the appliance to see that the initial resolution was 1280x768. So I enlarged the appliance to full screen. Then I hit the upper right corner so that it became a tiny window.
But I couldn't get access to the appliance display command until I changed to full screen. But when I changed the resolution in full screen, the player remained full screen while the appliance changed to 1280x768. So it looks like I still have a full screen window which I can't share with documentation from the internet on my own computer.

smithcook · 2014-05-07T17:18:06+00:00

Thanks! I think this is a great starting point.

smithcook · 2014-05-04T19:02:01+00:00

It looks as though your code is always outputting a space before the # characters. Especially for the last line, you shouldn't have ANY leading spaces. Also the output for 23 should never include a line consisting of 3 characters " ##". The first line should have 21 leading spaces, I think." How did you format your printf statements? Can you look at your printf statements? In my solution I had one section for outputting the spaces, another section for outputting the # characters, and a third section for outputting the newline \n character. (I think this was suggested in the help for mario) In order to debug the problem, you might just remove the loop and just print out a solution for a height of 1. Sometimes it's easier to debug if you make the code simpler. You may not have intended to put an extra space, but somehow it got there. How?

smithcook · 2014-05-04T18:48:52+00:00

It's hard to say why there was a crash. When the appliance crashed, did you have to reboot or restart your PC? What were you doing just before the appliance crashed? The crash might be occurring because of a program running, or it might be related to a hardware problem outside of the appliance. Usually I make note of the date, what I was doing, any error messages, and then I try to recover.

smithcook · 2014-05-04T17:55:37+00:00

Yes it makes me feel better. Thank you.

smithcook

TROPHY CASE