#TC101 #CourseReview
Programming in C++: Course Review
As we steadily approach the end of the semester, we can now look back on the experiences gained throughout this course and reflect about them.
Since I´m taking this course for the second time now, the experience miaght have been a little different for me than for everyone else, since I was already familiarized with all of the content, yet I didn´t have a perfect understanding of quite a few things.
Before I get into the course topics themselves, I’d like to talk about this new teaching method, the so called “Flipped-Classroom”. For me it was a great idea, it meant I could do my programming whenever I wanted and use the time in class to work on other projects or homework, which I really appreciated since. This had a bad side effect towards the end of the second parcial but I´ll talk about that later.
The fact that we had to upload our Blogs was also a good idea since it forced us to explain ourselves what our programms did, and sometimes that led to us finding mistakes within our codes or a better way to do something. And by making everyone´s code available, it was easy to get past beign stuck by looking at other classmate´s codes.
Now about the bad side effects I mentioned earlier. Since I didn´t go to class all that much, I didn´t get to know many of my classmates, so that really took a hit on the whole social aspect for me. Part of me just wanted to be alone to prove myself I can get this course done by myself, kind of the reason I did the final Project alone, and the less-tech savvy part of myself just wasn´t used to the whole blogging-twitting thing.
that´s one of the bad side effects having so much freedom had on me. The other one was worse, I think.
When I programm, I´m used to having the Internet and my other codes around, so when I get stuck I usually go into a fórum, check other student´s blogs or check my own codes for advise. When the second parcial came, I was not prepared for programming under such conditions. I have to say I was feeling confident, since at the beggining of the course we were told there would be no formal exams, so I never really cared about my programming environment. For this third parcial I know better and will prepare myself accordigly.
That beign said, I do think there could have been a Little more input on the teacher´s side. Just as a general idea I think it would be effective to give the students some keywords on what they need to know each week, or maybe some quick theoretical quizzes, just something that gives you feedback on wether you are studying the topics properly or not. Otherwise I think the flipped-classroom experiment was a success.
About the programming side of the course, I really deepened my knowledge on stuff like arrays, vectors and passing values to other functions and returning values from them. I was already very comfortable using loops and conditionals, but I had always had trouble defining functions and getting their values so I could use them elsewehere, but the Sudoku Project really helped me on that. Also, I never used strings before, neither did I extract text from text files, but there were a couple of WSQ´s that made me use them, so that is something new that this course taught me. I thought the quizzes and WSQ´s got more challenging in an effective way and really tested what we were supposed to know.
Course Review by diegodamy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
