Week 6 – recursive structures

                Something that I encountered in lectures this week was trees, it was completely new to me. The name tree comes exactly from the tree out there in nature. The trees can grow and shrink. There are roots, branches and leafs. You can only reach a leaf with one unique path. There is only one node in each tree and it is distinguished as root. Each non-root node has only one parent. You can calculate the height of the tree and branching factor of the tree. In class we did many examples with trees using recursion, such as: summing up the number of nodes in the tree, height of this tree, leaves and the branching factor. I enjoyed learning about trees, it gave me new insight on structuring data sets. I understand the majority about trees but there are some areas where I lack. I’ll be going over it during the reading week to gain a much better understanding where I lack. My confidence about trees is high, I feel like I understand the concept and where I could apply it. Now when I see trees outside, I’ll be thinking of trees in computer language.

                This week in the lab we worked on recreating given functions without using certain methods. It was a challenging lab but fun at the same time. We also did some unit testing, something that takes up a lot of time, I think. The hardest part of the lab was Pythagorean triples. We had to find every combination for Pythagorean’s triangle given the hypotenuse. It felt like an achievement once my lab partner and I finished it.

                Assignment one was due on Thursday. I was able to complete it all including the bonus. It felt like my biggest programming achievement to date. The biggest issue I had was with the recursive step. It took me a few hours to complete with my partner. Eventually we got it and moved on after a tiny celebration. We tested for an hour to ensure everything was working properly and we improved our docstrings.