Coming into CSC165 and my first two weeks of university I was expecting a heavily based math course. To my surprise, there has been almost no math throughout the first two weeks, instead , there have only been exercises to improve problem solving, logical analysis and communication. Now, this is completely different from anything experienced in high school. In particular, during the second lecture, Professor Heap introduced George Polya's "How to solve it" problem solving strategy. When attempting to apply this concept to the streetcar example (determine the ages of the 3 children), I was utterly confused and lost. To me, this seemed like a hopeless case as I had failed to read between the lines. When the strategy used to solve this problem was revealed, I was astonished and admiring the lesson I had been given. I had discovered my own way of thinking was too simple when trying to problem solve. I believe to overcome this, I simply have to practice until these problem solving strategies become second nature.
Later material introduced included Venn diagrams and falsifying/ verifying universal and existential statements. I found the tutorial one exercise extremely straight forward and simple, and the first tutorial quiz to be even simpler. On the other hand, I feel as if my understanding of verifying/ falsifying certain if,then statements could be better. Certain words such as "only" create ambiguity in my mind as I can see P and Q going either way. Instead of relying on my own logic, I would have to analyze each of the 4 true/false cases and conclude which would make the statement false and thus discovering the correspond P and Q. Again, I believe with more practice this process will become shorter and easier. My understanding of this is not to my satisfaction as I have realized these if, then statements correspond to other classes such as MAT 137.
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