The purpose of a reflection exercise is to step back and reflect
on your learning in the course. Pedagogical research shows
that building an internal meta-level model of the material
is valuable
for understanding and long-term retention. Equally, you understand
something about yourself: how do you best learn? what does it
take for you to "get" something?
The material for Reflection Exercise #1 will be Modules 1, 3, and 4
(We'll skip Module 2 because it's more straightforward and
focused on the planning problem).
For the purpose of examining one's learning, let's divide the
learning opportunities in these modules into three categories:
- Learning by programming or reading code.
This is when you've made a leap in understanding because you
wrote some code or because you understood something better
by seeing the concept in code.
- Learning with a visual demo.
In this case, you merely use a program (without caring about the
code) to either produce some numbers or a graph, and it's the
graph or data that causes the learning.
- Learning the traditional math way.
In traditional math, you learn by understanding math symbols
and equations via algebra and via their meaning.
The goal of this exercise:
- From Modules 1, 3 and 4,
pick two examples of concepts that you learned mostly
by programming or reading code.
- Then, pick two examples where the primary insight came from a visual
demo (the second category above).
- And, finally,
pick two examples where learning mostly occured the third
(traditional math) way.
- For each of these six, you will need to:
- Identify the Module and Section number, and if relevant, the
in-class exercise number.
- Explain in a 4-5 sentences, perhaps with an accompanying
figure, your rationale for why you picked
each example in each category.
What to submit:
- A single PDF called reflection1.pdf with six
parts labeled "My example #1", "My example#2" etc.
- For each example, identify the module/section number, and
write your rationale.
Reflection Exercise #2 (due after Module 8)