Reflection of the Week

This week's lectures focused mainly on recursion which is an important concept to understand in order to be able to simplify difficult problems into smaller easier ones. At first glance at recursion, I had some difficulty in understanding the process because of a few minor reasons: not enough time to trace out the code completely, and not enough practice of the concept. For example, in the turtle problem I traced the first and second level of recursion incorrectly due to not understanding how the loops worked with recursion. In order to understand the process a bit more, I have chosen to go back to the first level of recursion and retracing it with pencil again. However, this time I will be tracing the turtle problem and other recursion problems at my own pace of learning and giving myself a longer time period to absorb the concept between each step. I believe this practice will help better my understanding of recursion if even slightly. I truly want to understand recursion because I value the virtue of being lazy in the first year of computer science. Recursion leads to this laziness by simplifying a program that may need 100 lines into a shorter one that only needs 20 through recursive calls. This saves time, effort, and code for the coder. My dream of designing games may cut down from an impossible goal to a reachable goal through recursion.  Mastering recursion will be my goal for week 4 and beyond for CSC148.