Two Weeks Left in "Principles of Computing"

I managed last week with data structures and inheritance swimmingly. These two are right up my ontologist's alley. This week's recursion topic is a mind-bender, but I am wading through it. I still struggle with the more math-heavy aspects of the class, though.

There are two parts to the class besides the material: homework and mini-projects. The homework is more a quiz-style format. There are approx. 10-12 multiple choice questions. I have found that these questions are extremely hard for me to grok, and almost always math-heavy. The mini-projects are the actual coding tasks. They include things like simulations of zombie apocalypse, recreating the 2048 game, and word wrangler.

Usually, I need the week to watch the videos and work through the math/coding notes and do the practice activities. I prefer to start the mini-project by Sat to have both days of the weekend to work on it. There isn't much time in there for the hours I would need to finish the homework, so I usually drop it, or make one attempt and then leave my crappy score. There is a very real disparity between how well I can do on the homework and how I do on the mini-projects. I pull a 100% on the mini-projects every time.

It is really unclear to me how much emphasis I should be placing on the fact that I am throwing homework under the bus. I am not too worried about the number grade I get for the class; I am more interested in gaining the knowledge. That said, it still isn't clear to me how much I am leaving at the table by not dropping the class now and switching to a discrete math class, and later returning when I have a better handle.

Even though there is a follow-on class in Algorithms, I am thinking that I will wrap up this Principles of Computing class, then switch to a discrete maths class. Once I have that, I will pick up an Algorithms class. Luckily, Coursera has two: an algorithmic thinking class that is part of this series, and another two-part course done in Java. If I can catch the two-part one in Java, that might be a better choice: more in depth and exposure to Java.