Victory, Defeat, and a More Intense Plan

I finished up my coffee machine project and it works great.  The machine itself only runs a few lines of code, relying on the object and its functions to perform all the tasks behind the scenes.  Another level of Abstraction from a CS video series I watched on Youtube comes to mind.  I have no idea what I did with that link, and I really should find it because I think I still had a couple of videos to watch and they were awesome.

After that, the course briefly introduced how to fill multi-dimensional arrays and then proceeded to through very complex array problems at me.  I spent all of Sunday and then most of yesterday trying to solve one "sudoku solution checker" with a user defined sudoku size between the square of one and ten.  I drew it all out and I know what I want the code to do, I just can't figure out how to make it do that.  I tried googling all kinds of ways to find what I wanted to do & everything I found didn't actually work, or was written for a 9 x 9 grid and I couldn't figure out how to scale it to be variable size (and I tried and tried and tried.)

And so I did something I don't usually do, I gave up.  I skipped over to the next problem and again I couldn't figure it out.  This time I didn't waste days in frustration but passed over that second problem to another hard ranked question.  The third one I was able to solve with a little help from Stack O. I had to get creative though with figuring out how to debug the program.  We were given four lines of four characters each and had to input that into a 2-d array in order to implement it.  Most of the issues I had were actually taking that 4 character string input and inputting it as an array in my 2-d array.  I'd run the first test, it'd pass, fail the next.  Fix something, second test would pass, fail the third etc. until I figured out that my solution method wasn't the issue, it was my input method.  AHA!  And then it came together.  Still I was mostly frustrated by the sudoku problem which obviously when I understand more of the Java language, I will have to come back to.  Right now, I feel like a frustrated kindergartner who knows what she wants but can't get people to understand based on the words she has to use.

I'm branching out my learning plan though to use more than just coding language specific resources.  I'm using the resources at OSSU open source society university (ha!) to take some foundational coursework as well.  I started on the Core CS portion and am taking How to Code - Simple Data on edX and signed up for Programming Languages Part A on Coursera.  I'm confused about the certificates offered & I hate the way edX doesn't even give you the chapter questions unless you pay for the certificate.  I understand not wanting to take up a TA's time with an audit student, but just having the handouts would be nice.  The Coursera class says it doesn't start until August which is confusing because it seems to be the same - basically already prepared videos and materials.  I haven't started it so I'm not sure if the material is all present for free versions.  Anways, that's the plan.  Although I'm sooooo not taking math.  I took enough math in college.  If I really have to, I guess I'll come back and look at the math section, but otherwise nope nope nope.