What were your overall thoughts on the class?
A mix of challenging and relaxing, but at no point unenriching. This course will expose you to several aspects of C++ you may have never heard of before. If you’ve never used C++ before, this does a great job of teaching it to you for the first time as well. The projects were mostly interesting and fulfilling as they would try to be related in some way to lecture material as well as the weekly papers. There were several times I’d read one of the weekly papers and think to myself on the subsequent project “yeah we need to do that.”
What were your thoughts on the professor?
He’s always animated, friendly, and eager to teach his craft. He is more than knowledgeable of the best practices, and really does try to foster an environment that gets people to talk about programming. If you’re not quite sure what’s going on at any point, do reach out to him and be explicit about what you don’t understand. He speaks the same language as students, but he can’t get by on non-descriptive terms when students ask vague questions. With multiple reasons for multiple decisions being made when writing certain code, he can talk about it all as long as you point out the specific point of confusion.
How did you feel about two-stage quizzes and tests?
They were a benefit to the course. It always felt hypocritical in some classes that the benefit of peer programming and learning from your peers was praised, yet every activity and assignment were to be done individually. To some extent this makes sense in an environment where you have to be evaluated, but nobody ever gets to utilize those aforementioned benefits. I learned more from interacting with my peers faster than I would ever have going back later and reviewing the material.
How did you feel about cold calling?
Cold calling was a necessary “evil,” in order to encourage the majority of the class to do well. For most of the course, cold calling was a motivator to never stop paying attention in class. Glenn is always kind when people can’t answer a cold call, but nobody actively enjoys being wrong, or being in the dark. However this does mean sometimes that Glenn will try to get you to arrive at answers 1 step at a time, which as a spectator can be notably painful when someone really doesn’t know what’s going on.
How did you feel about office hours?
Office hours were regular and easily accessible. I personally didn’t have to use them very often, but I would always notice the piazza posts, or canvas messages of TA’s and Glenn adjusting their office hours on a regular basis, and well ahead of time. I can’t recall ever reading an “apologies for the missed office hours,” rather than “office hours cancelled/rescheduled.”
Final Notes:
Start with implementing the simplest thing first and work from there. When writing any piece of code, have specific intent. Glenn works hard to expose us to good practices, and it does benefit you to be active in changing your own coding methodologies.
