Week 16 Retrospective

What went well:

Building an app sessions are extremely fun. This week I taught JavaScript which actually required me to prepare, and I also debugged on the spot. There was also a question of null versus undefined, which seems kind of like a stupid JavaScript thing. Apparently null is an object while undefined basically means we haven’t assigned a value to a variable. In any case, it was fine and I think showing students how to debug and find answers was good. We also decided that we’ll continue using Doodle to find best times to meet due to everyone’s unstable schedule. I also want to make sure people who can’t join have opportunities to join, and that we don’t pick a time that a student always cannot join.

We had a great sharing session too in which students showed their different forms; I gave them a challenge to submit a form and put some text onto the page using the form information. That was fun, and they each did it slightly differently. I think giving them some freedom for creativity and problem-solving and searching online is pretty great. It was fun! I really like these sessions because it’s interactive. I didn’t know how to debug a student’s form code though right off the top of my head, so there was that. I need to look into it a bit more.

I also helped a team scope out technically what to do, and I really enjoyed that. Some teams haven’t gotten together to figure out an app idea yet, so I’m thinking in this coming week, I probably won’t introduce Firebase yet. I think I’ll probably talk about Github, and although repl.it doesn’t require us to install an IDE and can still use Firebase, it doesn’t have Github support. I should probably think about whether I want to make all the students use Mimir or just install stuff onto their computer. Most students are students from my class so only 2 or 3 of them would need to get a new account, but it might still be annoying to deal with. Not sure, I should give this more thought.

I helped my incomplete students with actual coding which was good; I see them learning which makes me happy.

I had a few more 1:1 chats with students who wanted them, and that was pretty fun. One of them has thought a lot about cellular automata which I’ve never heard of, so it was fun listening to him talk about it.

What could be improved:

This week went well, I’m not sure if there’s anything that I want to improve.