Discuss your biggest success during the course. What was your breakthrough, and why did it matter? What did you learn, about the technology, and also about yourself?
I believe that my biggest success in the class so far is being able to grasp new technologies relatively quickly. In our project, while I have worked with similar technologies (JavaScript vs TypeScript, AWS vs Google Cloud) I entered our project with limited to no knowledge of what my group was going to use. As a team we focused on learning the new technologies in the first week of the project so that we all could at least contribute by talking about what elements we wanted to include in the project. Overall I found that TypeScript, in my opinion, is a better language for web development than JavaScript. I find that TS is much cleaner to write, and I find that the automatic typing is hugely beneficial to making logical programs. I found that learning Google Firebase was challenging at first, but as I started to use the technology and see how it was interacting with our data, it made a whole lot more sense. All this being said, I found that I am definitely a visual learner. I learn much better when I am actually working with the technology, rather than watching a video about it. I found that the more I used the technologies, the easier writing code and interacting with the different elements made sense. I very much enjoy learning new technologies and how they work, however, I definitely get frustrated when things don’t click immediately. Perseverance, especially in this project has been key to my success.
Conduct a SWOT analysis of this course. SWOT means: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities (to make this course better), and Threats (what are any serious issues that could affect the quality of this course). Discuss each.
Strengths:
- Requires high level of collaboration within a group – similar to the real world
- Get to work on a real project that has real world applications
- Get a better feel for an Agile/SCRUM team environment
- Demands work each week – working on something throughout the quarter to keep us engaged in the class
- Forced to learn new technologies and expand our knowledge of the software world
- No quizzes/tests – don’t need that kind of busy work in one of our last classes
Weaknesses:
- Busy work with blog posts and check-in surveys that have an impact on our grade. These assignments don’t truly test our knowledge or coding skill, I think they could be worth less in the grand scheme of things
- Required 10 hours per week of work – I found that being a working individual, some weeks I was really pressed for time getting in the hours for this class. Other weeks when I had more time I was not as stressed. I would think it would be better to see an average of time worked on the project during the course of the quarter
Opportunities:
- Maybe make the blog posts more frequent but shorter assignments – make the blogs interactive and about the individual experience with the project. I think that would be much more beneficial for students as they could see their progress and write about it each week
- Group interaction – I think it would be cool to be able to interact with another group and each build something for the other. Would provide more of a collaborative effort and help us understand even more of the technologies that are available out there
Threats:
- Overall I think this course is well designed – I think as I mentioned above, the time commitment each week could be adjusted in some way to account for people who work full time or most of the time. After all, this is a post-bacc program and a lot of students are working or have families – sometimes it is not always easy to guarantee a certain amount of time each week
- Don’t limit the technologies that people can use, I think it is great to have a list of recommended technologies, but there is always new software coming out each week, month, year that is great for people to try
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