In my time with Oregon State I have seen a lot of teaching styles and a lot of different techniques used when it comes to learning. I am a hands on learner so when I get to do a project and figure it out, I am learning at my best. This project did exactly that. It got me in an environment where I was in a group and it was up to us to figure out how to do almost everything about the project. That was the exciting part for sure. It felt like we were actually on the job and doing our parts as a team. Which is a great sign for a capstone class, to give its students the feel of a real life job experience.
I feel the instructor did a good job of keeping the class up to date on things and laid out the class well from the beginning. We knew what our goals were, when they were due, and had resources available if issues came up. They did a good job of grading promptly and keeping us going on our projects with feedback along the way.
Some of the work felt like busy work, like the blog posts, but as I wrote them I saw more of a value in them than at the beginning. Communicating about what developers do is a big part of getting to the next stage of our careers. We need to articulate what we have done and how we have done them, so this exercise has proven it’s worth.
The bad. My main gripe with this class is the amount of time we had and process in which we chose our projects. It felt like we were thrown into a bucket of ideas with little instruction or guidance and we had to choose the whole project that we were going to tackle for a few months in only a few hours time. Having that window open for viewing a bit earlier in the off period between quarters would go a long way.
Overall, my experience has been positive in this class. My group has done a great job communicating and working throughout the quarter and I look forward to finishing as a team in the upcoming weeks. Life definitely can get in the way of our progress, and with any school program that is taken into account by the other team members. I can definitely see how a different group could have made this a much less enjoyable experience, but I’m glad we had the group we did and we put the work in that we did to get to the finish line.
I think this capstone class does a great job of challenging us to show what we have learned and to experience new coding technologies in a learning environment to help us better succeed in our future coding careers.
