Week 4 (Sept. 17th-23rd): CodingBat

This week we learned strings which seemed to make sense to me during the presentation, but once we were released to work on the lab I found myself hitting a wall with what to do.  I was able to get individual sentences to work, but never get all of the boxes checked off at once.  Since I started on the ABBA lab, I thought maybe the others would be different and I proceeded to go look at the rest of the labs.  Unfortunately I was wrong and they increased in difficulty as they went along (as one would logically expect them to).  This ate up class time, so I never did get it during class that day.  I mentioned my problem to Kason later in passing, and he suggested that I was thinking too narrow and to try a broader approach.  I ended up getting back on at home to try and figure it out once again, and sure enough my problem was I was trying to specifically make a sentence instead of inputting variables for what I wanted to accomplish.  Once I made my code more generalized, which only took one simple change, I was able to check off all of the boxes and therefore finish that lab.  After figuring this out, the rest of the labs seemed to fall in line quite quickly and I was able to knock out everything else with relative ease.  Being able to figure this out was quite the confidence boost for me in regards to my coding abilities.