For week 3 of Bootcamp, I was out of town and had to take classes remotely. Luckily, I was prepared and had the homework and class materials available beforehand. This allowed me to do all of the activities for the week and start the homework before Tuesday’s class. I had the homework done by the end of the trip. So I wasn’t really stressed about falling behind at all.
Now, I have to talk about the remote courses. Taking this class remotely is horrible, terrible, and generally just not good. The class is really meant to be taken in person, there are tons of breaks and a lot of material written on a chalkboard which you can’t see from the video slides. All you hear when the instructor writes on the board is click click click. it sounds like he’s typing on a noisy keyboard but you can’t see anything. I started to call it typing on the board. Then you hear random conversations over the break. One that was particularly interesting was when a student rambled off 200+ digits of pi for a $25 bet, which she won! But for the most part, there is unrecognizable conversation and a lot of silence for activities and breaks. We have 3 hours of class and it’s filled with over an hour of breaks and probably another hour or more of class activities. So sitting remotely with the class assignments already done with less than an hour of actual instruction wasn’t the best use of time to me.
This week we had to do javascript. So now that we know HTML and CSS over the last two weeks we can make the pages more interesting using Javascript. Our homework assignment was to build a password generator. So that was really challenging and fun. I appreciated this assignment because I really tried to catch all of the scenarios for the homework. I felt like I was building something real and on my way to getting that first development.