Final Blog Post

I thought that this semester was pretty good. I like python, so using it and learning about it for most of the semester was nice. I thought that the sudden jump to the app inventor at the very end was kind of abrupt, but we had to jump to it some way, so whatever. If I have one complaint about this semester, it would probably be that we almost spent too much time on python. After a certain period of time spent on just python, it all started to kind of blend together, and the individual lessons we were learning felt less distinct from each other. Python is a full programming language, so I understand the need to cover a lot of material, but learning about only python for nearly an entire semester certainly got tiring, if not uninteresting. Maybe we could have done a bit of processing either at the beginning or somewhere in the middle, just to switch things around and give a bit of variety, rather than putting the two new things both towards the very end and spending all of our time basically since we started Jeroo on the same programming language. There was variety in terms of what the different labs were about, and some of them (such as the one with the Caesar shift) taught me some interesting things that were only tangentially related to what we were learning at the time. So, in short, while I enjoyed the class and like programming in python a lot, I thought that maybe we could have mixed it up a bit towards the middle of the semester, so as to keep it all from running together. Also, though I think I’ve mentioned this in an earlier blog post, I wish we could have used Coding Bat more often. I liked the way that it helped to teach all the concepts we were learning, and the constant introduction of widely varied problems on the same subject helped to keep it fresh. They were like mini-labs, and I thought they were pretty fun. The extra involved with completed certain amounts of them was also something that I liked.