Course reflection – successes and improvements

I feel that this course has challenged me unlike the other courses I have taken in the past. In previous courses, I always had some sort of guideline or TAs to help with any confusion that I had. There was always some sort of structure to follow and specifics to fulfill. This time around, much of the development of the project is up to us to create how we want to. This has been both exciting and challenging. When I run into issues, there is no structure to fall back on or anyone to talk to for help besides my teammates. My biggest successes come in these moments of blockage. Having to figure these issues out on my own teaches me to use the resources I can gather on my own and it helps me to learn that I am capable of independently working on the tasks I give myself. I’ve learned a lot about the technology available to society and how to use those technologies to benefit myself and others while researching and working through these blockers. It’s been a very gratifying experience all around. 

This course has taught me so much. If I were to discuss the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats about the course, I would start by saying that the creative freedom while still having some requirements to follow would be a major strength. I loved getting to figure out how to complete these requirements on my own terms and it has taught me to become a better coder. A weakness of the course, if I had to pick something, would be the lack of resources. I wish there were more options for me to turn to for issues that I might have to be working through. Aside from TAs, I would like some more links to resources available to us. For opportunities, I would have really liked to see maybe a discussion thread on Ed or Canvas discussions to be able to choose our own groups. I felt that I was rushed into creating a form and my group, while great, could have used a little more diversity with personalities to make things run smoother. For threats, that would be really difficult for me to pinpoint something. If I had to, maybe the blogs. I think these would be more fun to be discussions than blogs. These don’t really feel super helpful. They seem more like fun side projects and if we do have to do them, I’d like to see them as discussions so that I can more easily see others’ blog posts to read on their successes and revelations.