Well, the time has finally come, dear readers, and the feeling is bittersweet. Our final week of Object-Oriented Programming has come and gone. Our final exam covered a lot less than I had anticipated, but its style and form were much like the midterm.

We have reached the end, dear readers! The finish line has been crossed, the ribbon cut, the bow taken…..well on the project front, at least. This final project did an excellent job of solidifying my understanding of inheritance and dynamic binding, as well as, gave me a second chance at working without getters and setters and the alternative way of thinking that involves. I would like to re-emphasize how grateful I am for projects like these – manageable yet challenging – that subtly but effectively imbue knowledge pertaining to a particularly important programming concept or strategy. I wish more classes mirrored this approach. While they try, these projects usually end up being too lengthy or beyond our skill level to truly gain the required knowledge without an answer key.

The end is near, dear readers. We’ve begun our final project! We’ve been assigned Conway’s Game of Life with the same caveat as Project 4: no getters and setters. I must admit that I am extremely grateful to have the opportunity to gain more experience with this particular object-oriented challenge. Though I learned quite a bit from Project 4, I felt there was still a great deal more for me to grasp. I would go so far as to say Downing may have planned it this way – to give those students who were more behind on the last project more time to learn the important points. Thanks Downing!

Second to last project down, dear readers. We’re getting closer and closer to the end. I will say that this was, by far, the most difficult project we’ve had in this class. Partly due to the sheer open-endedness of the system design and partly due to the challenge of breaking a convention that has been so deeply engrained in me from previous Java courses. That’s right, dear readers, NO getters and setters! It was horrendous…. I literally had to break my brain several times in order to come up with new ways to communicate data between different classes. We didn’t fully finish the project, but we got most of the major functionality working.

Getting close to the end, dear readers, and the class is ramping up fast! After being spoiled by the straightforwardness of our previous project on allocators, I admit to being utterly confused on this next project. It’s an exercise of getting objects in C++ to “talk” to each other (i.e. share data or give instructions) without using getters and setters. My partner and I attempted to do this using interfaces (or abstract classes in C++), but this become overly complicated and messy very quickly. Now we have a few ideas on how to give instructions via functions, but the actual access of internal data remains a mystery. Hopefully we’ll get some insight this week in class.

Another week in the life, dear readers. This week in class we got into the more complicated structures and concepts of the course – delving into building inner containers of different data structures. It’s a really great review…until you get called on in class and feel like a complete idiot for not remembering what container makes up a priority queue (it’s a binary heap by the way). So embarrassing…. Thinking about the finer details of these structures, however, and expanding on the basic concepts we learned in Data Structures many moons ago has been fascinating and extremely helpful.

Nothing much to report this week, my dear readers. We received our instructions for Project 3 to make our own allocator. Our job is to mimic the heap, though a much simpler version of it. Once again Professor Downing has given us all the tools in class we need to complete the assignment and made sure we understand the requirement exactly.

The wait is finally over, dear readers. Exam 1 has come and gone!

The time is upon us, dear readers: TEST TIME!

Two projects down!

One project down, four more to go!

This week we had our first project due. It involved incorporating a wide range of development technologies to present a solution to the Collatz Conjecture. As we got deeper into the project implementation, it became clear that the underlying purpose of the project was much more than simply to simulate a work environment. Downing stressed the importance of attention to detail, but this turned out to involve much more than paying close attention to the explicit directions. There were all sorts “hidden" tips and instructions in comments among the files. In this way, we as the “workers” had to look beyond the details of the explicit instructions from our “manager” and seek out illumination in the inner workings of the project.

Our first full week has passed and the pace has continued without fail. Sunday night we were assigned our first project over the Collatz Conjecture. This is an individual project, so most of us are already hard at work on it.

What a whirlwind of a week!