January 17, 2001 (Wednesday) Discussion of the maximal subsequence problem. Motivation: image segmentation. Cubic algorithm. Linear algorithm. Reference: Bentley, Jon. _Algorithm Design Techniques_. Column 8, pp.77-86. Addison-Wesley, 2000 (ISBN 0201657800).
January 24, 2001 (Wednesday) Lab 1 activities as for the other students. Much interaction. Students helped correct my errors. Some questions related to javadoc and html. Before lab, TAs and I uncover problems with dowloading from www. Matthew Byrd contacted to fix downloading problem.
January 31, 2001 (Wednesday) Lab 2 activities as for the other students. The students achieve various solutions for the conversion of a float to a currency, taking into account the possibility of negative and imprecise numbers (such as -99.999, which should convert to -$100 and 00 cents). The solutions seem actually better than Sahni's original, which would not convert -99.999 correctly. Almost all students run javadoc. (Some did not know of the -author flag.) More than half of the students also complete the lab for Greg Dobbins's sections, which involved writing equals and clone methods for the Throttle class. Much interaction.
February 7, 2001 (Wednesday) Lab 3 activities as for other students. Some students do not complete the activities, but most do. Most test programs are not comprehensive; some only test the equal method. Additional activity consisted of analysis of two variations of ensureCapacity() for the IntArrayBag: constant increment of one (1) and doubling of the size of the data array. Harish and Suman take over the middle part of the lab because of Faculty Senate meeting, which I had to attend as senator.
February 14, 2001 (Wednesday) Lab4 activities as for other students. Most students find this to be a challenging lab. (Applet test program for IntArrayBag.)
February 21, 2001 (Wednesday) Lab5 activities as for other students. Most students (and the instructor!) find this to be the most challenging lab. (Find an item in a linked list; reverse a list.) I tell the students that copying a list in reverse order is easier than making a copy in the original order, because adding to the head is easier than adding to the tail of a linked list.
February 28, 2001 (Wednesday) Lab6 activities as for the other students. Most students finish rather early and have time to write a good postcondition for the deleteEven method. Emphasis on use of the linked list traversal pattern using a for loop.
March 7, 2001 (Wednesday) Lab7 activities as for the other students. I miss the lab because of my son's sudden illness. The lead TA, Suman, teaches the lab.
March 21, 2001 (Wednesday) Lab8 activities as for the other students: applets and threads. This lab requires me to teach the students about concurrency and threads, important topics that are normally not taught in 146 lectures. All students complete the lab in time. Most use the stop() method to stop thread execution; I explain the alternative technique of using a loop control variable that is an instance variable for the Runnable class.
March 28, 2001 (Wednesday) Lab9 activities as for the other students: searching a stack (using another stack). Some confusion about equals method vs. ==. All students complete the lab on time.
April 4, 2001 (Wednesday) Lab10 and 10alternate activities as for the other students. Suman leads most of the lab, because of Faculty Senate meeting and candidate's visit.
April 11, 2001 (Wednesday) Lab11 activities as for the other students: improvements to the discrete event simulator (car wash). Nice discussions of the results with individual students. Two students also complete an interactive version of the program (which was not required).
April 18, 2001 (Wednesday) Lab12 activities as for the other students: PP6 Ch8: recursive computation of the number of combinations. This was a difficult discovery lab, and many hints had to be given.
April 25, 2001 (Wednesday) Lab 13 activities as for the other students: PP10 Ch8: "guess the number" game, recursively. Interesting discussion of stopping condition and precondition with several students.
May 2, 2001 (Wednesday) Lab 14 activities as for the other students. MT2 is finally returned. Questions about program 5 abound. Several students have already completed program 5. Discussion of some questions in midterm 2.