Introduction

Here I am again! I hope you are excited to see me, friends. It has been a long week, and I am so glad to see the final month of the year. I have worked hard this week to see that I can finish my assignments on time and it worked...because hard work still works.

How did I manage my time this week to keep up with the assignments?

Remember that I also complain about the poor internet connection the last time I wrote about the week?... How did I also manage that?

How I Managed my Time This Week

Given that I have had connection challenges the past 2-3 weeks, I aimed this week to avoid the challenges I have faced with a poor internet connection. I was not able to eliminate the problem or solve the challenge, but I was able to manage the condition to meet my goal for the week.

First, I noticed that this poor internet connection problem was much more prevalent at home than at school...

Remember that I am also doing a diploma program too, just in case you have forgotten or are not aware!

So, my first plan was to allocate time at school for my Kibo studies. It wasn't so simple because I had to sacrifice some things such as giving more attention to the online lessons than the lectures I had in school, staying in school till late evening before heading home, and more. Because...

"A man with a goal set priorities and priorities mean that something must be sacrificed in the 'priorities chain'*"*

And Kibo means more to me, she aligns with my goals and my dream.

Furthermore, I focused on the online lessons and stayed away from the assignments. Before this week, I pick a course, go through the online materials, do the practices (if any), and then do the assignment. Once that course assignment is dusted, I move to the next course.

I changed that this week. I focused my attention on going through all the online materials for all the courses before I attempted the assignments. It worked like magic, for me!

Also, this made me notice, at an intense level, the connection between all the materials.

I also noticed during this week's community gathering that I wasn't the only one struggling with limitations that confront Africa's distance learners. One of them that came up a lot was the power supply constant failure. It made me wonder if there were solutions that we could come up with to tackle this. I know that there are solar solutions to this problem but they are usually unaffordable to the average African.

"Could we develop cheaper and more affordable solar solutions for African students?", this question rumbles in my head.

To be honest, during the period I faced connection challenges, a question like this had come to my mind:

Is there a way to use the laws of Physics to attract enough radio waves signals into my room in order to improve the internet connection 😂?

My Learning Experience This Week

Last week, I didn't mention a word about what I learned last week. And that was part of the plan. I know the mode and mood of my writing will evolve with time. Sometimes, t will be more serious and geared toward explaining a concept or concepts that I have learned over the week. Other times, it will be much more exhilarating...

This week, I have learned a lot...

A lot...because I am naturally a person who learns from every experience (pleasant or unfortunate) but this week's learning goes beyond just my natural phase of learning.

With Number Theory I was exposed to in MT, I explored some algorithms and how their practical use cases. I came across the Euclidean Algorithm which I tried to implement in Python. The guiding question was also an interesting one for me. I explored how images are stored digitally as bits of the RGB layers of the combination of the pixel (or would I say matrix of numbers) where each pixel RGB combination represents its intensity. When performing the simple maths as shown below, I found out that there were over 16 million color choices for a pixel (I don't know if I said that right).

$$RGB = 256 \times 256 \times 256 = 16,777,216$$

Each of the colors above is a byte and a byte is made up of 8 bits. This shows that 256 possible numbers represent the amount of each color.

To learn more about this, check out this article on Analytics Vidhya.

Mathematical Thinking also opened my understanding of the power of division this week. I learned how the division algorithm was used to enable counting systems, determine the greatest common divisor of two numbers (do you know that one of the applications of GCD is in encryption algorithms?), formulate modular arithmetic, and develop the concept of congruence. It showed me how mathematicians used their microscopic eyes to invent complex algorithms and definitions by using simple rules.

The last statement contains a lot of information, read it again.

Programming 1 (have you found an abbreviation for this course name please?) exposed us to one of the most powerful data structures. Dictionaries!

Remember that piercing cry that your piano gives you when you press a button somewhere? Dictionary! :)

We learned how to create, read, update, and delete data from Python dictionaries. We looked at the use cases of dictionaries and lists and how they differ from each other.

The project assignment was also fun. We were required to use Python dictionaries to create a log analyzer to extract some information from a fictitious company's customized log files. FUN!

Finally, Web Foundations introduced us to adding interactivity to websites using Javascript and event handling. For one of the practice projects, I created a slide show from a web page written for us, such that it responds to only two events (ArrowUp and ArrowDown) to move the slides... I wanted to also use scroll event to handle this but it wasn't working. Also, there was no animation which made the slides' movement look rigid and coarse.

I will get back to it when I have learned more.

I am yet to complete the Web Foundations assignment because I am collaborating with two of my peers. And whenever I collaborate with others, I tend to slow down since every one of us has to be on the same page.

Should I say "thanks for listening" today? I have said it a lot! Since this is my first December article, I would end this article differently:

Do you know that the Luhn Algorithm is used to validate a credit or debit card number?

Happy Festive Season!