I know that 201 isn’t a class but I couldn’t decide between my two 201 classes, EE 201 and CSCI 201. It’s funny that my two favorite classes have the same numerical designation but they really are just great classes.
In EE 201, we are designing small scale digital circuits to program into and FPGA board. I actually thought I wasn’t going to like this class too much but it’s extremely interesting and has a lot of fun challenges. It’s all about logical thinking and problem solving and the class is very well designed. The labs, homework and lectures all synchronize perfectly and I have learned a great deal in just the first few weeks.
I’m excited for the end of semester project (even though it will be a ton of work!) We get to make anything we want for our boards (one cool example I saw was pac-man) in hardware language. It’s a different take on programming from the high level languages we have been using in the CSCI classes.
CSCI 201 is a software design course. I’ve had a lot of fun with it because the focus is not on the programming but on the software design. I found with my first project that when I created a solid design, the code fell into place really nicely afterwards. We are also learning about agent based systems, which are a highly scalable and distributable design paradigm for software.
I like thinking about the software engineering and design side of programming so this has been a really fun class so far. Later in the semester, we will get into large teams and work on a big project together which will be a first time experience for me (at my internship it was a small team). It will be a really practical experience and I know it’s a skill employers value so I’m looking forward to that as well.
So far Junior year has delivered with great courses.
