Student Name: Gabriel Davila Sudent Email: [email protected]
Reflection is a key activity of learning. It helps you build a strong metacognition, or "understanding of your own learning." A good learner not only "knows what they know", but they "know what they don't know", too. Learning to reflect takes practice, but if your goal is to become a self-directed learner where you can teach yourself things, reflection is imperative.
- Now that you've completed the assignment, share your throughts. What did you learn? What confuses you? Where did you struggle? Where might you need more practice?
- A good reflection is: specific as possible, uses the terminology of the problem domain (what was learned in class / through readings), and is actionable (you can pursue next steps, or be aided in the pursuit). That last part is what will make you a self-directed learner.
- Flex your recall muscles. You might have to review class notes / assigned readings to write your reflection and get the terminology correct.
- Your reflection is for you. Yes I make you write them and I read them, but you are merely practicing to become a better self-directed learner. If you read your reflection 1 week later, does what you wrote advance your learning?
Examples:
- Poor Reflection: "I don't understand loops."
Better Reflection: "I don't undersand how the while loop exits."
Best Reflection: "I struggle writing the proper exit conditions on a while loop." It's actionable: You can practice this, google it, ask Chat GPT to explain it, etc. - Poor Reflection "I learned loops."
Better Reflection "I learned how to write while loops and their difference from for loops."
Best Reflection "I learned when to use while vs for loops. While loops are for sentiel-controlled values (waiting for a condition to occur), vs for loops are for iterating over collections of fixed values."
--- Reflection Below This Line ---
This assignment was a great way for me to get more familiar with using the debugger in VSCode. Before, I wasn’t really using it much—I’d just try to spot errors by reading the code or rerunning it over and over. But this time, I actually set breakpoints and used the step-by-step execution to see how the code was running in real time. It helped me understand exactly what was happening at each stage of the program and how the variables were changing as the code ran.
The coolest part was being able to pause the code and inspect the values in the VARIABLES section, which gave me more insight into how things were working (or not working). Using the debugger feels like having a tool to "see" the code's behavior instead of guessing at what went wrong. I still have a lot to learn, especially when it comes to debugging more complex issues, but I’m definitely more comfortable now and will use it way more often moving forward.