What was the problem you were solving in the projects for this course?

The ABC University Computer Science department would like me to create a program that assists advisors at the school in organizing available courses and shows the course ID and any prerequisite for each course using an appropriate data structure.

How did you approach the problem? Consider why data structures are important to understand.

The approach I took during the course was to evaluate each data structure, vector, hashtable, and tree structure. The reason for evaluating each data structure is because each data structure can be useful if the data being evaluated is of a certain size as some structures may not be good for larger amounts of data, if it needs to be sorted, etc. Although vectors are good for just storing lots of data, it is very time consuming to sort said data. Hashtables are much better when the data being stored needs to be harder to access and only accessed by approved users, but this structure makes it almost impossible to sort the data without being very time consuming. So for this project I felt the most viable data structure was a tree structure as all the data can be sorted by a common data type, searches can be very quick, and adding new nodes do not take too much time.

How did you overcome any roadblocks you encountered while going through the activities or project?

Any roadblocks that I came across while developing the project I was able to alleviate by looking up the errors online and figure out why the error was occurring, or by looking up some documents on cplusplus.com, I was able to look at other available functions to solve the problem that I was having.

How has your work on this project expanded your approach to designing software and developing programs?

After the work on this project, it has expanded my approach to future programs by giving me more options if I need to store data in a given way. This has also taught me how to evaluate functions that I have made to check the runtime efficiency.

How has your work on this project evolved the way you write programs that are maintainable, readable, and adaptable?

In the event that I use a data structure such as the tree structure, I would make sure the keep the functions and variables in another code file to ensure the main file is not overloaded with code. I have also made sure to go back through areas that are new topics for me and make sure to provide as many comments as possible without it being overwhelming to explain concepts that I may forget in the future.