Thursday, July 5th, 2012

Assignment 1 is due at the start of class tomorrow.  Luckily, you all earned a DAY OFF through good attendance!  That means that you'll need to drop your project off at the Homework Boxes in Deschutes BEFORE 2pm on Friday 7/6.  Projects will be collected at 2:00 and anything after that point will be considered late.

Please bundle your assignments together and label each piece.  You can staple pages together or put it all in a ziploc/manilla.  Just make sure it will stay in tact in the mailbox!

Conquering the algorithm!

What *is* an algorithm?  That word strikes terror into the heart of people everywhere, but I'm about to demystify it for you.

An algorithm is just a list of instructions that you can follow to get a desired outcome.  It's a series of steps that leads you to a result.  In fact, many of us use algorithms pretty frequently.  Shopping lists, recipes and DIY websites.

We use algorithms much the same way in computer science, except that we get all excited about making sure that we're using the smoothest algorithms with the least number of steps, which gives the fastest result.  We're kind of obsessive like that.  Sorting is one of the things that we're a little compulsive about.  Searching is another one.  Can you figure out why?