Just finished the first two weeks of academic work here. I’m planning to do a post like this every week. I didn’t last week because it was all mostly just admin work. Classes are really starting to shape up now though.

In Visual Web Design, during the first week we were just being taught the basic principles of programming and stuff. Since I’ve been programming for years I already know all this stuff but I’d totally forgotten that some things may not be obvious to people that have never coded in their life before. Some things we had to take note of:

• Commands have to be typed exactly should be
• The order of the commands are important too. A lot of people seemed to slip up on this one. When we were practising with a program called GPE (I think the uni designed it as a learning device), which only has a few commands like “north”, “south”, “change colour”, and so on, a lot of the people expected the computer to know which order to do everything in.
• Variable names to first, and then the information that you want to put into them. A lot of people thought that “stringstring” = foo; was valid, when they meant foo = “stringstring”;
• Creating functions to do repeatable code for us

Then, we suddenly just jumped into using Visual Web Developer, where I found out we’d be using ASP .NET, which I’m a bit annoyed with for two reasons:

ASP is shit. No one uses it. Well, some people do, but a lot of people talk about “upgrading” to PHP, which I think is an apt way of saying it. I mean, you can’t really code in ASP without buying the £300 IDE. And even then it produces horrible code. I suppose some people do still use it, so learning it won’t be a total of a waste of time.

Second, I think we jumped into it a little bit too fast… People were clearly confused as soon as she started talking about objects. I mean, it took me a good while to understand objects, surely students can’t be expected to understand what an object is with just “an object is a thing”. To her credit, we did a light bulb example, going through what functions(/methods) a light bulb object would have, but that confused even me… I just wish there could have been a tutorial on this, not really for me but for the clearly confused people sitting around me. A big problem there though is that we don’t have any tutorials for that class, just computer labs. Maybe we’re just expected to pick up things quickly now we’re older.

Anyway, in our last lesson, we use Visual Web Developer to make a simple form, then we learned… naming conventions I guess. The form didn’t have to do anything, I guess we were just getting used to how to be comfortable with the application.

Our tutor is a good one, and seems to be able to clear up confusion when people look confused, which is good. But one thing that does bug me is that she just reads out the handouts she gave us word for word. Not only does that completely negate the point of giving us handouts to read, but it makes her sound dumb. I know she’s not! But when all you’re talking about is something that we know is written by another person, it looks like you’re just passing on the information rather than sharing knowledge. It also makes the class slightly boring, for me at least. I don’t want to be sitting there just listening to someone; that’s boring. Listening and reading the handouts would at least give me something more challenging to do, but since she’s just reading aloud there’s no point.

We’ve been put into groups to do our project work in. My group is actually fairly good. Some of them haven’t done programming before, but that’s fine. When we were working on an exercise together everyone was giving input, so I think they were understanding it. When they weren’t either someone else explained it, or if no one else could I’d step in. I think I’m a pretty good teacher.