Yingfu has been studying at Rice for two months and just finished two mid-term exams last week. The course "Principles of programming languages" taught by Cartwright is very interesting which not only focuses on building blocks, semantics and type systems of programming language but also introduces some fundamental concepts including alonzo church's lambda calculus back to 1930s. And the projects are using Scala to write a small functional language called "Jam". The course "System dynamics" taught by Marcia teaches yingfu some mechanical background starting with the classic mass-spring-damper systems. The last course is Algorithmic Robotics taught by Lydia, which introduces many algorithms for doing motion planning.
