Project Reflection

This assignment sounded complicated but when I pictured how I wanted the project to work, it was simple. However, how I pictured it had a ton of errors, parts that wouldn’t compile and that led me to not finishing the project in time. I broke the program up into three main parts. The Menu, The Clues, and The Board. I got only about two out of the three steps done. This assignment was to make a crossword puzzle inside the console in Java with a menu that could display all the clues or one clue and allowed you to submit or erase an answer. I only finished the program to the extent that the menu could print out all of the clues or one clue. I ran into logic complications when I went to work on the crossword board (which I decided to make a list of Square objects that took in a single char input). I couldn’t seem to get it right, always running into runtime or logic errors. 

I definitely learned a lot from this project, like how to break a big task into smaller tasks, and although I wasn’t able to successfully complete this project. The skills I learned will help me in the future. During this project I suffered horribly from my innate habit of overthinking the simple tasks. Even though I was never the best at the file handling units in Java. I think this project would’ve gone better had I spent less of my little time thinking about the logistics of the project and actively figuring out how things would work. 

This assignment for me was really difficult, but interesting. I feel if I had another opportunity to do it again and a little more time I would be able to complete the project. I would definitely break it down into smaller, simpler tasks next time instead of bigger classes because I definitely overthought the tasks I had to do in the classes especially the Clues and Utils classes which were the classes that were used to read through the text file, split the string into pieces on delimiter “:”, and store it in a list. I overthought how each function was supposed to work which resulted in a huge delay for me. I felt like I was properly organized during the duration of the project. I kept the classes I had to write in a Trello board and organized them based on the priority in which they took in order to make the project. Overall I liked this project, I made it more complicated than it was but I feel like it was an interesting challenge as I feel I was definitely close to figuring out the crossword board part of the project.

Old Colony Crossword Puzzle – Junior DDM