Course Review

--Originally published at Hell Yeah

I am currently in the last few hours before the end of the Object-Oriented Programming course, taught by Ken Bauer, with whom I happen to share birthday.

This course was made in such a way that I never saw before. The learning was left almost entirely to us, Ken was more of a guide than a teacher, and I think that was a great way to structure it.

In terms of learning, I went in with little to no knowledge of Java. Object-Oriented Programming in general was an area almost completely unknown to me. With the problems that Ken “assigned” and a few on my own, I was able to learn more about how Java works and why OOP is often used instead of Imperative Programming. Not all of it was practice, the videos that we watched offered interesting perspectives on the theorical side of OOP, along with the opinions of people far above us in knowledge of this topic.

I also learned to use a little of Eclipse, a tool that is used a lot in Java programming. It is, as Ken said at the beginning of the course, a Titan of a program. It has a lot of things that I have no idea what they do or why they are there, but the things I learned to use, I found that were extremely complex but not unnecesarily. What it does, it does not do in a half-assed way, but it can be overwhelming at times.

Also, Github. I have had my Github account for ~2 years, not knowing what it was. I saw on /r/learnprogramming again and again that having a Github account is essential in this line of work, but I never really understood why. Now, I still have a lot to learn and understand about it, hell, I can’t use the terminal commands for git without a guide open in another window, but I know why it is important and what it can do. Github is really the best way to store public code and to manage big projects on a team. It also serves as a kinda-portfolio that gives a testimony of what you know and what you’ve done before.

Talking about the structure of the class, it was a bit “Laissez-faire”. Ken just guided us in the direction we should be going and helped us when we had trouble, but this class did not hold our hand. We were expected to learn on our own and to do our own research about the challenges we faced. I really liked this and I would chose it over the traditional way anytime.

Course Review

--Originally published at diegotc2016

I think this course was a lot more different than the Programming Fundamentals course. The first two partials were kind of easy, I just needed to learn some new concepts that with the help of lynda.com and Stackoverflow were really easy to find and learn it. The tough part came when we applied those new concepts in the project, my project isn’t finished yet, because I was working with some youtube video tutorials and the tetris series isn’t done yet. In spite of the proyect not being done, I’ve learned a lot new stuff. My team also made a Buscaminas proyect which is done, but it was kind of easy so we decided to make the Tetris too.

Here’s a youtube video of me last semester talking about how Ken’s class:

Course review

--Originally published at miguelmzbi

First I just wanted to say this blog’s photo is mine :D I took it for my photography class when doing all black or all white content.

As I think I wrote in some of my first post, I really do prefer self learning, and that is something I liked about this new way of experiencing the course. The problem is that even if I did have the time to do the work and I made all of it, most of the time I left the assignments until the end. I guess that I was missing the pressure of failing or the need to obtain all the point in the partial-term rubric. But that was fixed on the second partial. Still on the first one, I think I’ve self evaluated correctly.

When doing the assignments I got the basic ideas of the related concepts of the course. That isn’t bad, but I feel -as some of my classes did comment- that maybe more assigment could be useful to learn all the capabilities and functionality of the concept I just learned.

Still, that wasn’t a problem, because what wasn’t clear, I assure you, doing my Minecraft-Forge project forced me to understand every concept… all of them, I used all of them coding my mod. And also I learned a lot about Forge (The Minecraft Moding API), and how a hassle it can be, and the importance of documenting everything if and when I do a program, because that is a problem I think Forge did have.

Lastly, I want to congratulate Ken. He made a good and big effort realizing this course. Nothing it’s perfect, but this teaching model is going in the correct path.

I hope I have more courses with this style in the future.

That’s all… You can go now.

Bye…?

TC201 #CourseReview – Mr. I Never Use an Umbrella

--Originally published at Orientierteprogrammierungobjekteundetwasmehr

This course has been something really new to me.

I learned the more fundamental concepts of Object Oriented Programming, as well as putting most of these into practice. Classes, objects, attributes and methods. APIE: Abstraction, polymorphism, inheritance, encapsulation and delegation. Has-a, is-a relationships. Visibility modifiers. Overloading and Overriding. Also I learned about software development tools and practices like UML and CRC cards. I still have to learn about the metaobject protocol. I also learned a lot about the Unity game engine and about video game networks and protocols, the Authoritative Server approach, latency compensation, client prediction, server reconciliation and other interesting concepts. this and this are some really nice articles about the subject.

First off, I thought I wasn’t doing a lot of things, the course was really relaxed, doing the assignments whenever I wanted and learning whatever I wanted. A lot of people coursing OOP with Salinas told me that I was learning nothing, because the way the class works. But at the end of the first partial I realized I had learned more than my fellows from the class of Salinas, and they are still saying “you didn’t learn about Java user interfaces”, but honestly, I don’t give a duck about user interfaces. I was learning all the theory and doing the programming wsq’s by, which is quicker than having the teacher trying to put the concepts in everyone’s head in one class, because I think everyone has it’s own learning rhythm.

I personally think this teaching method is really good and could work really well, but first, ken has to polish some aspects of the course:

First, there must be more emphasis on doing the assignments, because people (at least most I know) is not very interested in self-education, they don’t do the things they should until they realize they have one or two days left for finishing everything. They don’t manage their time correctly, they prefer to procrastinate all the time instead of focusing in what is really important.

Second, I think there should be more programming assignments, sometimes I learned the concepts, did the posts about what I learned and everything but never put these concepts into practice, making me feel like I did not master the topic completely, and I don’t mean learning Java, I mean reinforcing the concepts learned with something practical, because I definitively think that this class (and every programming class) should be language agnostic, focusing on learning the theory and putting these concepts in practice in whichever language the student wants.

I think that if ken really efforts improving his course in these aspects he will have a really, really good course, keep the good work!

Course Review

--Originally published at Ce qui est chouette

Kinda-self-taught, mostly-self-graded, hella cool. This model of teaching/learning, for me, was freeing in a way; without having the pressure of working for a grade, I could take my time doing the assignments, understanding the concepts and working on a project at my own pace without any worries -I still did the assignments, mostly, the day of.

Regarding the course’s content, concept-oriented learning is a good way of getting object-oriented programming. Most of the time, I felt I was really learning the concepts, then applying them through the assignments. More Java would’ve been cool, especially since the latter half of the second partial, it seemed as though most of the concepts went unexemplified.

All in all, it was good and cool. Would definitely recommend.

-The person whose identity lies written on the about section.