I managed to sleep through the alarm for both Wednesday and Friday of last week, partially because of a math midterm on the Wednesday, and for no real apparent reason on the Friday. Maybe it was a sign that I was getting sick, since I have the flu now. Darn.
Anyway, onto CSC165-related material.
Began working on assignment 2 on Sunday and -- pardon the geeky statement: thank goodness for assignments. These assignments, in my opinion, really help me to understand the concepts taught over the weeks, since it really gives us some more practical experience. This also goes for tutorial handouts and quizzes, but I feel that it's much better in the form of an assignment, since you're given a lot more time to work on them, and you get to work with a partner (or two, if you're daring) to talk things out and ask questions.
On the other hand, I'm definitely going to have to read over several of the notes on proofs again, now that I understand more about them. Sometimes, the answer is staring me right in the eyes, but I just don't seem to notice them, such as how 15 can be rewritten as 11 + 4 if I need to factor something out. I'm sure this type of intuition will come more naturally with practice, though.
Time to figure out what to draw for this post!
Practice definitely helps. What also helps is keeping an eye on what you want to reach (which also sounds obvious, but we are dealing with not-always-obvious obvious things here it seems..). By this I mean, don't blindly keep manipulating something until it is the result you wanted, instead, at each step, think about what transformation you could apply to get closer to the result you want.
ReplyDeleteIt definitely helps to step back a bit and just wait for a "eureka!" moment, I believe. I agree, though, that blind manipulation does end up complicating matters more and could wind up wasting a lot of time.
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