Week 1 in CSC165

The first week of CSC165, I learned Professor Heap's approach to problem solving. I'm used to expressing problems (in math classes especially) as lists of inputs given and outputs desired. What I hadn't done before was the solution planning part. Usually when I solve a problem, I immediately dive into without articulating how I'm going to solve it or thinking about alternate solutions. Professor Heap's approach requires you consider multiple plans for divining a solution for a problem. Interestingly, when you describe the solution you're looking for, it's better to keep the answer general. For example, when we were searching for the three ages of a commuter's children, the solution we were looking for wasn't 2,3,4 or 4,3,3. All we wanted was 3 numbers.