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We investigated the concept of inheritance and interfaces as they relate to parameter passing, instantiation of objects, and the parent-child relationship.

The student and I went over a lab assignment, where he had to find an existing example of code smell. After spending some time looking through the code, we were able to find a couple of different places where we could improve the maintainability of the code base. We then reviewed some C++ code and went over conflict resolution in git. We were able to add some more functionality. The rest of the session went well, and she seems optimistic about wrapping up this week.

We covered heaps. First, we reviewed binary heaps, which the student was awesome at, even though we did it almost a month ago! Then, we discussed some new complexity notions of the different alternatives to heaps. Lastly, we covered leftist heaps, their additional null path length property, their new ordering, and how to merge to leftist heaps together. The next time we'll verify that we did this problem correctly and discuss the skew heap extension, which is not that difficult. I think she really nailed this session, which is great!

We covered two of the student's project questions. We were working on understanding the basics and then relating it to the program. She understood the material really well and was able to write programs by herself. I saw a huge improvement from the first class and she definitely tried working on areas she was having problems with earlier.

We went over recursion and merge sort. Those topics are really difficult conceptually, but the student made some great progress by the end. I'm very proud. I recommended he watch YouTube videos on recursion and sorting algorithms with visual components.

This was our final session to complete work on the student's Go project. The last remaining pieces of the program were handling captures and enabling the AI to select and make moves. The latter task involved using a heuristics function to compare potential moves with the AI's current score to provide a challenging opponent.