Week 4 - Working with Partners

This semester is the first time I've had to labs for a programming course. For last semester in CSC108, I always chose to work on assignments alone. My main concern was that I barely understood how I was going to implement my code, so I didn't want to become further confused with someone else's suggestions. Since I've been working with a partner in the labs, however, I've found the process pretty encouraging. When we're both typing out code, we have twice as many eyes to catch the little errors we make like the wrong kind of brackets, forgetting parentheses when creating an instance of a class, etc. Also, I feel more confident with a class' implementation when I can discuss with someone else how that code should work. Sometimes, we're not sure what the implementation should be from the get go. In those cases, we have to combine our knowledge to figure out the problem. We're also more honest when we become stuck. If I'm programming alone and I become stuck on a certain function, I stubbornly struggle with it for a while without making any progress. When there's two people both stuck, I feel like they can quickly admit their stuck and then figure out why faster. All-in-all, these labs have been a positive experience for working with someone.