COSC1519

Before this course, I had absolutely no ideas about programming so it started with a lot of challenges for me. So I needed to do a lot of researches by reading textbooks and online tutorials. This course used Jython to introduce basic concepts in programming like variable types - declaration - assignment - comparison, syntax and coding conventions, program structure and execution process, etc... Jython is an implementation of the high-level, dynamic, object-oriented language Python seamlessly integrated with the Java platform.

It took me almost a quarter of the semester to research and practice myself. Some of the concepts are quite apparent and straighforward. Step-by-step, I could understand the way a small piece of code run from start to end. Those codes were just as simple as solving a math problem using basic calculations, comparisons and simple flow-control statements (if, if-else, switch-case). Then I wwnt further to learning more complex structures using loops with keywords while, do-while, for and break.

The course helped me a great deal in my practices with its weekly assessments including home-work and Weblearn tests. There were also sort- and long-anwser assessments in tutorials, for which my knowledge had to be ready before each class.

Weekly assessments: Answer quick questions and do programming.

• Briefly explain a piece of code, give the outputs or tell if the code throws any error.
• Write codes for home-work excercises to process photos: modify photo color, resize - crop - combine photos, copy a whole or parts of photos, modify objects in photo, rotate - invert - flip photos, etc...
• Write codes to solve math problems in different ways.

Assignment 1: Apply a Vignette Effect to a photo using a Vignette profile photo.

• To simplify the assignment, the processed photo has the same dimension with the Vignette profile. However, students can use photos of various dimensions if they wish to.
• The code needs to load the two photos into memory, then read through every pixel in each photo to modify color values (RGB values).
• The code should allow for turning "color wrapping" on/off to have the output photo in 2 different cases.

Assignment 2: Text recognition inside a photo

• Since text-recognition was still a developing technique in industry, the assignment only required the code to recognize popular standard text fonts.
• Level 1: The code can recognize all letters in the alphabet including lower and upper cases.
• Level 2: The code can recognise a complete sentence and print it out correctly. Student can include signs in the sentence if they wish to.
• Level 3: The code can recognize and print out correctly a whole paragraph. Student can include signs in the paragraph if they wish to.

On completion of this course, I felt really confident in programming. I understand all of the concepts and can apply them efficiently. I felt ready to step into advanced programming languages in the next semester. However, there was a regetful thing that I missed the final in-semester assessment which contributed 8% towards the final result.