The index cards (with questions people had) were very enlightening. There were some common questions that I thought I should answer. Class time is so limited that I need other mechanisms…
One comment a few people made: We spend class time on the tricky bits, not the basic parts. (said in various ways)
This is true. My reason is that I figure that the book is good at explaining the basic bits, so we should use class time for the trickier parts. In hindsight, I am realizing that there are some basic things that are difficult to get from the book. Of course, I’m not sure that there’s any way to get them other than experiencing them by trying. But, to those people who said “it would have been better to start with the basics” – I now agree.
To the people who said the assignment deadlines are clear (very few). I am working to keep the “Week in 638” widget (at the upper left of the course web page) up to date. It’s right there. If you are missing announcements, you can sign up to get an email whenever there is a posting to the web page. The Canvas page is admittedly a bit of a mess while we re-organize the course.
There were a lot of questions about manipulating the DOM from code. The basic “how do I learn about it” is “from the readings” (Chapter 13 of the book, which was part of last week’s reading) is quite good. I recommend reading it again. It talks about appendChild and replaceChild and other things that people asked about.
Some people asked about basic HTML structure. We probably could have spent more time on that. (but this is a JavaScript class, not an HTML class) Again, the book chapters are a good start. But, more generally, you will need to learn some HTML. I have created a new discussion topic on Canvas for people to leave suggestions of things they’ve found useful.
And yes … Part of web programming is using the web as a resource. Part of learning to do web programming is learning to make sense of those resources. Making searches to figure out details is part of the game. Hopefully from class and the book you know the right questions to ask, so you are only searching for the details (that are too numerous to discuss in class).
Anyway, this was really useful for me to understand where people were getting stuck. Clearly, there are some things I could be doing better. I’m delaying puzzle 2 until I can make some adjustments.
