For these two classes (ENGINEER 1D04 and ENGINEER 1P03) should I use pen/paper or would a laptop be a better idea? Are there many diagrams or is it all/mostly text?

Originally Posted by RememberTwce

For these two classes (ENGINEER 1D04 and ENGINEER 1P03) should I use pen/paper or would a laptop be a better idea? Are there many diagrams or is it all/mostly text?

Eng 1D04 is programming. It's kind of like Defense Against Dark Arts in that the prof changes every year, so I'm not sure how to take notes. I remember the lectures being fairly useless in that the prof went a little fast, but that might just be because I'm bad at programming.

In tutorials, where you actually learn stuff, I took a few notes on paper and they sort of helped, but I found that paying attention to the TA instead of copying mindlessly helped best.

I hear Python, the language they're teaching this year, is a lot more noob-friendly, so you might have better luck. If you have a laptop, bring it the first day and see if it works for you or not.

I think Eng 1P03 is changing too, but from what I recall it's a lot of information regurgitation, though some of it might be common sense. Again, if you have a laptop, bring it the first day and see if it works for you. Just be careful with laptops since it's really easy to open up Firefox/Minesweeper/WoW and have your attention drift away.

I normally just pen and paper during lectures...you never know when the prof will pull out a graph or diagram that you need to copy down.

For 1D04 and 1P03, I barely made any notes. In 1D04, the tutorials and labs are where all the useful information is given to you and in 1P03, it's all common sense and stuff you can read up in whatever readings they give you.