With my very first uni exams approaching I have decided to take 2 weeks off from work to help prepare me for my exams. I have a week and a half to study and relax before the exams, which should provide me with the best possible result. I’ve read a few suggestions on how-to effectively study and work on a task, which I will try.
Splitting time into blocks helps stay focused on tasks. The idea is to split your day into blocks of time, such as 15 minute intervals, and switching tasks each block. This helps keep your mind fresh, and stops the task from becoming boring or repetitive. Let every 3rd or 4th time block be fun, such as a computer game or a video.
Write, don’t read.. Rather than reading a text book, and continue on the next task, write notes as you go. This helps you remember what you just read, and also helps you get your ideas onto paper. Great for exams.
Answer questions where possible. Most text books or uni courses have questions per chapter of text books, fill these out. Most of the time they only take a few seconds, but make sure you write the answers down and check them. If they don’t have questions, make them.
Noise environment. I can’t work in a dead silent room, nor a noisy room. I like to find a nice quite place and listen to some nice classical or ambient music, usually fairly loud. This helps to stimulate my brain.
Remove your self from distractions. It’s that simple.
I hope to be employing all these techniques next week to ensure I get the best score possible.
Also thanks to Sprocket Web Design for providing me a new kickass logo for my blog.
The last time I programmed in Visual Basics was about 3 years ago, and it was in VB 6. This was a big shock to me. The first step was to load a word list, and select a word randomly. Don’t get me wrong there are lots of information on the net about VB .net, but when your searching, it’s easy to pickup bits of information from VB 6. They changed Open filepath #1 as blah to FileOpen(1,filepath, blah) or something, why make the stupidest change.
Next was arrays, I wanted to put every line of the file, as a word in an array. Simple create an array, load the file by line, and append each line to the array. Not so simple, you first have to make a dynamic array, then tell it to resize to the size 0, then add an item, resize it one larger, add another line ect… Just silly, wheres the append function?
Ok, now we can make an control array of labels to display each letter. Oh, no control arrays. A bit of googling says everything is done in code now, and it’s better. Actually for me it was worse. I didn’t want to dynamically create controls, I just wanted 20 label boxes as an array. Now the websites were correct saying it was easy, but it wasn’t easier, and they neglected to say how to make the array. It took me several minutes to find the information required to make them.
The problems just kept coming and hangman took several hours to get to a very light version (no hangman yet).
So here I am thinking, I’m struggling, how is anyone else in this class gonna get this assignment done?
Silly VB .net, there is a really good reason I use python.