Lecture Review - Week 1

Introductory Lectures

Database --- This lecture has nothing much this week, spent more than half the time telling us what to expect. Gonna have a project in group of 5, and because I took the S-paper version of the module, we'll be preparing to give some presentations during class. The remaining time was spent on lecture 1, which unfortunately I have already watched the breeze lecture which was much more interesting and faster than the lecturer. Maybe the next lecture will be better cause I'll attend the lecture with no preparations.

Business Law --- It's a fun lecture. Interesting lecture made possible by a veteran lecturer who taught the module for 28 years... Apart from the materials in the lecture notes, learning which court you have to go to for the different amt of compensation you are demanding, she included many personal stories to share with us.

Business Communication --- This is basically just like the english lessons I used to have during secondary schools. This first lesson was about business correspondence. When you write a letter that includes good news, you jump straight to the point and breaking the good news to the intended reader. This is called the direct approach. When the letter is about bad news, you use the packaging approach, giving the bad news as little emphasise as possible. The last approach taught was the indirect approach. It's one where you used when the content is of little / no interest to the reader, and you have to try to get the reader to be interested. So you have to use the GIRO method standing for Gaining Attention, Increasing desire, Reducing resistance, Orchestrating action. Quite funny how people keep coming up with this type of acronym to help easy remembering, but which will cause lots of confusion at the same time.

Artificial Intelligence --- It seems to be another interesting module. The lecturer claimed that he is not an A.I. expert, so we can probably expect an easier paper from him. We'll be having 2 projects for this module. First is a mini-project to write an Intelligent Agent to play some chess game, on a 6 by 6 chess board. Can be done alone or in pair, so if I feel like I can do it, I'll probably be doing it alone. The final agent will be used to play against other agents done by other people, and if you win, you will score higher for that project. The final project details won't be out till later this week. Can't quite recall what was taught in the lecture, but the tutorial will be starting this week for this module, now I'll need to do some self-study again.

Software Engineering --- This is a CS module, targeting Computer Science students like myself, but this sem, there are more Computer Engineers from FoE, so the lecturer decided that the project can be done in C++ too, instead of only JAVA. Group of four, but I haven't decided who to work with. Most likely gonna be joining force with my primary school friend, Billy, once again after the project which we did in primary school some twelve years ago. The first lecture taught the different stages of software engineering.