I decided to write a little bit about the courses I have this term. Overall, I’m pretty happy with them, although Graphics is the only one I have nothing to complain about. Since the term is nearly over, it seemed like a good idea to reflect on these.
Software Requirements and Specification - SE 457
This course wasn’t one I was particularly looking forward to, but it turned out to be better than I expected. Our prof turned out to be quite good, and while the material isn’t the most interesting I’ve ever learned, but it isn’t as boring as I feared. The assignments are unfortunately not that interesting and a lot of work; they involve reverse-engineering the graduate admissions system. I feel the course could be better if it was more integrated with our design project course. The assignments could be to gather requirements and document the design of our project, instead of something fairly useless.
Graphics - CS 488
This course has been a lot of fun so far, but also lives up to its reputation of being a lot of work. Our professor is good, so the lectures are pretty interesting. The assignments are difficult, starting from 3D tetris and going up to a raytracer, but they are not difficult to get good marks in if you just put in the work - the grading scheme is known and pretty objective. I wasn’t sure how I was going to like this course, not having any real graphics experience previously, but I’m glad I took it. However, I dislike the lack of midterm, since it means there is no indication of what the final will be like.
Introduction to Database Management - CS 348
This course hasn’t been particularly interesting so far. Our prof is decent, which helps, but the material is pretty basic. The assignments are fair, and were representative of what was on the midterm. I probably wouldn’t have taken this class if it weren’t required, but at least it’s not actively bad and is instead just boring.
Concurrency - CS 343
This course is a bit of a mixed bag. The prof is rather mediocre, and a lot of the value in the assignments is obscured by the use of uC++. For those of you that don’t know, uC++ is a C++ dialect that is used by essentially nobody. I really disagree with the use of uC++ for this; I think it should be taught in a higher-level language. As it is, the majority of the time in the assignments is spent debugging C++ issues instead of dealing with actual concurrency; even Java wuoldn’t have nearly as many problems in this. Since uC++ doesn’t use concurrency like any other language, the material from the assignments is also not particularly useful, and as long as this is going to be the case the assignments should be about concurrency, in my opinion. Some of the material is pretty interesting, as long as we are talking about the general form of the concurrency and not uC++, but this isn’t nearly as often as I’d like.
Formal Languages and Parsing - CS 462
The topics covered in this course are really interesting. I like a lot of the theoretical aspects of CS, and this course definitelly is on the very theoretically side. Unfortunately, the lecturer we have is fairly bad, which is disappointing as this was the class I was looking forward to most. The assignments have so far been pretty reasonable, although several of the problems are straight from the book. Again, the lack of midterm means there isn’t necessarily a good way to prepare for the final, but the final is take-home at least.
Design Project - SE 390
I’m still not entirely sure what I think about this course. The entire course revolves around a group project which we pick and continue developing for the next 3 school terms. This is a very cool idea, and a project of this length has brought up some issues that don’t generally come up in school assignments. The actual deliver ables for the project this term are very ill-defined, which is pretty annoying since we are getting an objective grade. The lectures, while entertaining, are also more or less useless - Paul Ward mostly just talks about whatever he wants. It seems a lot like an applied entrepreneurship course, which is neat, but I’m not sure it should be a required class.
I wholeheartedly agree with everything you say about uC++, but I don’t know that a higher-level language (at least, a language higher-level than uC++) is the way to go about teaching the course. I think a lot of the struggle for people last term in RTOS was due to there not being a deep enough understanding of the fundamental problems of concurrency. A lot of the higher-level languages that I know you like really hide the dirty work of concurrency. Maybe I’m just outright biased, but I think a course where they hand us GCC and pthreads and make us re-do all of the CS343 assignments thus far would enlighten a lot of people.