After competing Assignment 1 and at this point of the semester, I have learned a lot of different programming skills that I never understood before. I believe that I still have a lot of work to do when it comes to programming, but I am starting to understand how everything works and how they work together. I believe the skills that has greatly improved is my ability to apply what we learn during the Labs by myself. When we work on the Labs, we follow along but with this assignment, I learned how to apply it to a different scenario from class. Some things that I need to work on to improve my programming skills are the little details. I need to work on getting the little details right because while working on assignment 1, I had troubles getting the quantities to the invoice page, but in the end, it was because the codes in the main page and invoice page did not match up to each other and they had different variables. This is just one example on how I missed a minor detail that affected my whole website supporting my skill to improve on.
After completing a lot of WODs, I can say that I can do them without looking at the screencasts first because I know where to get certain codes from and I know where to look if I do not know a code for something new. While working on the WODs, I normally do not look at the screencast unless I am absolutely stuck with the section I am on or if I go way over the DNF time. If I go way over the DNF time on my first attempt, I will normally look at the screencast because that would mean that I have looked at all my other resources first before finding the answer from the screencast.
The labs have helped me learn and I am able to complete them with confidence because most of the time when I get called on, I am confident of the answer. When I look ahead of the lab, I normally understand how to do the next steps on my own, so when we get to that part of the lab, it is reassuring when I get it correct. The statement “I feel ready I am ready to work on the next stage of complexity in programming,” I somewhat disagree with this statement because I believe that even though I feel somewhat confident in what I know right now, I still need more practice on it. I think by the time the next stage is due, I will be more ready but as of right now, I need more practice from the Labs or WODs to understand fully how to do the next stage of the assignment.
I think the class can be improved to help my learning if we completed the entire Labs in class. I understand that we can be behind schedule sometimes, but I think if we finish the Labs entirely in class and not do them on our own will help me understand the content more because sometimes, I will get confused on the parts we do by ourselves and not be able to understand everything fully once it gets turned in.
The things that work really well for my learning in this class is going through the labs together and talking with my classmates. Going through the labs together is something that works really well for me because it allows me to try to do things ahead of time and reassures me once I get it correct or wrong. Talking with my classmates works really well for my learning in this class because we can combine our knowledge together and help each other understand the things the other person doesn’t understand fully. Also, I believe that the response time to emails is something that helps me a lot because in assignment 1, I was confused on a certain part of the assignment, so when I emailed the Professor, I got a response that clarified my confusion within the hour. With a good email response time and the open office hours, those are other factors that work really well for my learning in this class.