CPR101 — Week 8

Think Like a Programmer, User Interfaces, Time Management

CP4P_Learning to Be a Programmer.pptx	Learning to Be a Programmer
CP4P_UI and Time Management.pptx	Lecture PowerPoint slides
CP4P_UI-TimeMgmt_Activity_Instructions.pdf	Activity Instructions
CP4P_UI-TimeMgmt_Activity_Answers.docx	Activity Answer document
CP4P_UI user interface handout.docx	In Class Exercise
Show provenance of _Activity_Answers development.docx	How to show you did the work

Notes

Estimate your final mark in this course: Course Marks Estimator.xlsx
N.B. Blackboard's Overall Grade, if shown in the Gradebook, displays a value based on a subset of marks and should not be considered a reliable indicator of progress in the course.

"There is more to life than increasing its speed." — Gandhi

Cramming does not work. The little you gain from reviewing late into the night, the more you lose in IQ points the next day. Studing is not about memorizing, learning is about encoding and retrieval. Encoding requires sleep, retrieval requires spaced practice. Both are the very opposite of cramming. Study tips from a U of T memory researcher who had to pass History and learn English:

“I was a lazy student and wanted to know how I could make the minimum effort to pass the [hated history] course.”
focusing on large amounts of information for a short time repeatedly is more effective than dwelling on smaller amounts of information for a long time. [It's the same amount of time overall.]
- “Instead of studying 10 new English words each day in the hopes of learning 70 words per week, I looked at all 70 words seven days in a row,” he says.
- “When you see something over and over and start recognizing it, you’re practising retrieving that information.
  Repeated retrieval makes it more accessible later.”
- "Although repeated study is sufficient to trigger systems [memory] consolidation, these transitions can only be successfully stabilized if sleep follows learning." (Himmer, et.al., 2019)
“The best way to retain information is to test your memory on it repeatedly, and to spread out the testing over time.”
- When reviewing the source material gets boring because you recognize everything, it is time to exercise your memory's output rather than emphasizing the input.
- Test and train your recall by writing what you can remember on paper. It stimulates the hippocampus, the brain's area responsible for memory and learning. Do this shortly before going to sleep.
Take breaks! Let your mind rest for at least 15 minutes a few times a day.
- ...away from the digital world. Your phone, games, social media, and Netflix are not restful mental breaks.
- meditate. take a walk. listen to music. -- pay attention to something analog that is unrelated to the busyness of the day.

From the New York Times... (use the Seneca library)

Smartphones, pings and social media have shortened our attention spans. Here is how to get focused again.
Take our seven-step challenge to reduce the obstacles — both internal and external — that hinder productivity.
Do you often find your workday spiraling out of control? Try these productivity techniques.
We all procrastinate, but why? We examined the emotions that are at the root of it and how we can focus our energy in healthier ways.
The biggest hurdle to meeting a deadline is sometimes getting started. To get there, give micro-progress a try.
Struggling to prioritize the right tasks? Regain control with an Eisenhower matrix.
These six podcasts are geared toward helping you to get more done, feel less overwhelmed