Jordan Bogaards
Week of 4 May – 10 May
- What did you like the least about the class?
The tests felt kind of unnecessary, somewhat similar to Computer Science UIL tests in that the contents didn’t really matter all that much.
- What did you like the most about the class?
The project was very fun and a great learning experience. I would honestly consider taking the class again just for that.
- What’s the most significant thing you learned?
Working together in software development. I’ve always done better just working on my own instead of in groups, but this course taught me how to communicate with my teammates better and the experience of working with others in development. This will be very useful for when I get into game development as communication will be very important there.
- How many hours a week did you spend coding/debugging/testing for this class?
On average probably 10 hours a week. The latter half of the project became a lot less time intensive, but the beginning required a lot more time and effort since we had to start and learn everything from scratch.
- How many hours a week did you spend reading/studying for this class?
Maybe 5 hours or so. The exams weren’t too difficult and the readings were fairly short.
- How many lines of code do you think you wrote?
I couldn’t even begin to guess, but if I had to put a number probably over 1000.
- What required tool did you not know and now find very useful?
Postman is very nice for making APIs, I’ll probably use it again if I do another web development project.
- What’s the most useful Web dev tool that your group used that was not required?
React-bootstrap was really useful for getting started. Its very simple system was nice for someone completely new to web development and helped me to learn a lot about it.
- How did you feel about your group having to self-teach many, many technologies?
It was both frustrating and interesting. Strangely, finding resources to learn the stuff was more difficult than expected but in the end everything worked out I suppose.
- How did you feel about the two-stage quizzes and tests?
I like the collaborative aspect of both, was honestly kind of fun to just discuss the material with friends.
- How did you feel about the cold calling, in the end?
Its both kind of frustrating and a really cool way to interact with the class since Downing is so forgiving with it. Honestly though, as someone with major social anxiety but also as someone who likes to answer questions when he’s feeling confident enough it was very frustrating. The possibility of being called out of the blue was a constant source of stress until I was finally called and could relax after. I remember on one of the first days I really wanted to answer a question that the cold called student was having trouble with, but Downing doesn’t seem to like the phone a friend option, despite waiting for around a minute in silence. After raising my hand for a bit my nerves got to me and I blurted out the answer and Downing responded “yes, but you’re not ____”. I still feel embarrassed about it typing this out now, though I know no one else cares nor remembers the event. Also one particularly frustrating day, I had been unlucky enough to get cold called twice, once earlier in the class and once right after the list reset. Despite all of this I think its a good way to interact with the class, but I think it would be nice to let others step in more often if it seems the student is having trouble.
Jordan Bogaards CS373 Blog 