Reflection

Well, the semester’s nearly over, so I suppose now we have to look back at what we did over the last few months. I thought that most of it was enjoyable. I rather like the lab format, with its allowance for you to pace yourself, and the challenges were often very interesting. I think that Jeroo is a fun program, though obviously not as in-depth as a full coding language like Python. Now for the criticisms. I don’t like the worksheets very much, in the sense that they are often very redundant, not only when compared to themselves but also to the rest of the class. The questions on the worksheets are all fairly formulaic, and so the problem becomes less fully understanding the concept, and more figuring out the one formula that works and replacing certain keywords over and over again. Not to mention, the labs cover the same material as the worksheets, but in a more enjoyable and interesting way. So, I’d say that I learned whether or not I understood the concept properly more from the labs than the worksheets or the quizzes. While I like Jeroo very much, I was not so much a fan of Scratch. It’s a good introduction to the logic of a computer, certainly, but it always felt fairly limited and simplistic. While you could certainly learn a lot about computer logic from Scratch, I don’t think that it’s a whole lot of good for anything else. Not to mention that Jeroo is pretty good for learning that kind of thing too. Maybe it would’ve been better to cover Scratch and logic more briefly, then go straight into Jeroo, perhaps leaving more time for coding languages like Python at the end of the year. That way, we could learn everything we need to start using a programming language, get started with a basic one with Jeroo, and have plenty of time for things like Python at the end of the year.

Blog!

I'm not entirely sure I like the worksheets in class. I mean, I understand the importance of worksheets and quizzes and the like to test our understanding of the material, but the worksheets just seem too repetitive. Once you get down the basic formula for how to get the problems, its just writing down the same thing over and over again with minimal adjustments to the same basic formula. I think there needs to be more variety to the problems, with each one testing a different facet of our knowledge on the subject of the worksheet.

Blog Post!

Time for a long overdue blog post, on Jeroo. Its overall going fairly well. I like Jeroo, and solving the puzzles in the labs is enjoyable, and also educational. Some of them are kind of excessively complicated, but we've got enough time to get them done, so I'm not exactly complaining. I think probably the only thing I'm having any kind of trouble with as far as Jeroo goes is elif statements. I mean, I get how you use them and what they do, but for some reason I'm just not getting why they do what they do, and what the process behind it is. Its not a huge roadblock at the moment or anything, but it could be a problem later on, potentially.