Assessments in module order

This assessment will evaluate your ability to define a professional persona consisting of a portfolio site, membership in professional networks, and technical essays that satisfy class standards.

Discussion:

• A common problem is the home page, which will leave a first impression on your visitor. Many portfolios contain a picture that is too big for the page and that pushes the content beneath it. Your picture does not need to be any larger than, say, 300x300px, and then it can be inline with the text. In contrast to the picture being too big, the text content is often too small! Provide the user with at least a couple of paragraphs about yourself, your background, and your goals.

• Another significant source of difficulty is the project page. Again, more time needs to be spent presenting projects in a way that helps the reader understand what you did, what you didn’t do, what you learned, and what you might do next.

• For your own benefit, please try to fix these problems. I am happy to take additional looks at your portfolio as you make changes if you want further feedback. Just email me.

This in-class WOD will assess your ability to write a simple Javascript program.

Discussion:

• Most DNF’s were due to small errors in reading the assignment. Don’t worry if you DNF’d: there’s plenty more WODs to come!

This assessment will evaluate your ability to write a high quality technical essay summarizing what you learned about Javascript, athletic software engineering, and JSFiddle.

Discussion:

• Overall, all of the submitted essays were acceptable. That’s great!

• As expected, many of you are still learning what it means to “write for the world, not the professor”. Many of the essays assume the reader knows about “the assignment”, or what a “WOD” is. Furthermore, some of the essays simply recount what the author did without motivating why the reader might want to know those facts. Assume that a reader from Ohio has googled, say, “hawaii javascript” and clicked on the link to directly retrieve your essay. Would your essay make sense to someone not from the University of Hawaii and not already in ICS 314? For an example of a 314 essay written “for the world”, check out Spending an hour coding FizzBuzz by David Aghalarpour from last year.

• Tip: on first reference to CodeAcademy’s Javascript track, or athletic software engineering, or WOD, provide a link that the reader can use to obtain more details.

• Several essays contained significant grammatical errors. You can often fix these by simply doing a second pass over the document after a couple of hours, this time focusing just on cleaning up the writing.

This assessment evaluated your understanding of open source software through review of your technical essays.

Discussion:

• A very nice collection of essays! All were at least satisfactory. Two went beyond that by providing a real sense for the author’s personality in addition to presenting the content. This made the essays very enjoyable to read.

This in-class WOD continued to assess your ability to write a simple Javascript program.

Discussion:

• I believe most DNFs could have been avoided by repeating the practice WODs until you could achieve them in Rx time.

• Don’t worry just because you’ve DNF’d these first two WODs; worry only if you don’t think you can commit to practicing the WODs more thoroughly in the coming weeks.

This in-class WOD assessed your ability to use the Underscore library.

Discussion:

• Results are a little strange because I decided to only count the first to two problems. Good news: everyone was able to accomplish the first problem. Bad news: no one completed the second problem. I think that my expectations were too high for what you could assimilate after working with Underscore for only a a week. Many of you struggled to understand the concept of passing a function as an argument. This will become natural to you in time.

This assessment evaluated your ability to write a high quality technical essay summarizing what you learned this week about Underscore, athletic software engineering, JSFiddle, and maybe Untrusted.

Discussion:

* Most essays were reasonably good.  Some students put in a very minimal amount of effort, and it showed.

This in-class WOD assessed your ability to write and test a simple Javascript program using IntelliJ, git, and GitHub.

Discussion:

• Finally, we’re over the hump: more students are passing than getting DNFs! Let’s get the DNFs all the way down to zero!

• There were some “creative” uses of underscore. It would never occur to me to use _.reduce to solve this problem, but it turns out you can!

• Several people DNF’d by making very simple errors (returning an array of arrays rather than an array of strings, etc.). Those kinds of errors will go away and that push the DNF rate down further.

• Keep up the good work. I am seeing a lot of progress in the class!

This assessment will evaluate your technical essay regarding the Coding module for clarity, insight, and conformance to the technical essay guidelines.

Discussion:

• Essays are mostly acceptable. Some folks are developing a nice “voice” that makes reading their essays a real treat.

• Be sure to report your times and attempts for all WODs. Not just “AV” or “DNF”. Keeping accurate data will help you better understand how you are improving (or not) over the course of the semester.

This in-class WOD assessed your ability to detect and remove coding standard violations using IntelliJ and GitHub.

Discussion:

• This was a “party WOD” due to my conducting the class over Slack. While there was a LOT of time provided for this WOD, most of the class somehow waited until the last minute to finish.

• Many repos contained IntelliJ files (.idea directory or *.iml files). While this was a violation of the coding standards, I did not DNF for this issue.

• Several students had such minimal READMEs and/or GitHub pages that they basically did not tell the user anything useful about how to run the code or even what the code did.

• My hope is that with additional practice those who DNFed will become more efficient at producing useful documentation.

This assessment evaluated your technical essay regarding the Coding Standards module for clarity, insight, and conformance to the technical essay guidelines.

Discussion:

• All of the essays were at least satisfactory, but none really got to the “excellent” level for me. Maybe coding standards just isn’t quite inspiring enough material?

This in-class WOD assessed your ability to write simple tests using Jasmine, Javascript, GitHub, and IntelliJ.

Discussion:

• Things are starting to look up, as the DNFs are way down.

• Most problems surrounded the attempt to create test cases that threw errors and the need to surround those function calls in an anonymous function.

• I am hopeful we can get the DNFs down to zero in the coming weeks.

This assessment will evaluate your technical essay regarding the testing module for clarity, insight, and conformance to the technical essay guidelines.

Discussion:

• Only 16 students wrote the technical essay this week. All who turned it in did a reasonably good job.

• I am happy to see that many of you are finding Jasmine to be a good framework for testing, and that you’re excited to see that you can test without using printf statements!

This in-class WOD assessed your ability to write simple CSS and HTML.

Discussion:

• Yes! At last, no DNFs!
• For next time, make sure to delete the .idea and *.iml files from your GitHub repo. I will start DNFing if I find those files in future.

This assessment evaluated your technical essay regarding the UI Design Basics module for clarity, insight, and conformance to the technical essay guidelines.

Discussion:

• All essays were satisfactory, although some are now on the edge of being unsatisfactory, because the authors are simply “reviewing the homework assignment” rather than “writing for the world”. It is important to review what you learned, but that review should be framed within more general insights about the topic under study. Ask yourself this: A year from now, if someone comes across your essay, what insights will they obtain?

This in-class WOD assessed your ability to build a simple web page using Twitter Bootstrap.

Discussion:

• The class is hitting its stride now! All but one finished the WOD and received full credit. It appears you are all getting good at studying efficiently and putting in the right amount of time to get prepared for the WODs.

This assessment evaluated your technical essay regarding the UI Design Frameworks module for clarity, insight, and conformance to the technical essay guidelines.

Discussion:

• Everyone’s essay was well above threshold this week. Good job! I am happy that many of you are finding Bootstrap to be such a useful technology, and that you’re starting to feel comfortable with UI design for the browser.

This in-class WOD assessed your ability to build a simple Meteor application.

Discussion:

• While the WOD required very little coding (Rx time was 7 minutes), it required a good understanding of the Insecure package and Meteor methods. Only four students completed the WOD within DNF time. To help everyone gain experience with the concept, I changed the WOD into a homework assignment and allowed submission up until 5pm. Everyone who attended class completed it.

This assessment evaluated your ability to write a high quality technical essay summarizing your experience learning about Meteor.

Discussion:

• Meteor is apparently a handful! It has sparked some very interesting essays this week!

This in-class WOD continued to assess your ability to build a simple Meteor application.

Discussion:

• Really nice results! No DNFs from those who came to class! And lots of extra credit awarded!

This assessment evaluated your ability to write a high quality technical essay summarizing your experience learning about Meteor during the second week.

Discussion:

• Everyone is in the groove. All essays were over threshold. Great job!

This in-class WOD assessed your ability to build a simple Meteor application.

Discussion:

• A few no-shows for class, and a lot of DNFs this week. That said, it’s clear everyone is making huge progress in learning Meteor and integrating all of the software engineering lessons of the semester.

This assessment will evaluate your ability to write a high quality technical essay summarizing your experience learning about Meteor during the second week.

Discussion:

• Overall the essays continued to be good. One of them even included a haiku!

This assessment evaluated the ability of teams to create the first Milestone deliverable.

Some of the system issues for teams to work on for the next milestone include:

• UI formatting: Do better than the example format with the six large format plain Jane buttons! It’s not good! That student had only one day to design it: you all have a month! Go find sites with layouts you like, then inspect their HTML and “be inspired” by it.

• Whenever the user submits a form, the system must provide feedback to user about whether the submit was successful. (The system should also do validation whenever necessary.)

• Users should select texts via pull-down menus (what would be best is to select the course with one pull down menu, then a second pull-down menu would display only the textbooks associated with the selected course).

• The user’s email should be the UH email they logged in with. You should capture that automatically on login.

• Home page should provide a nicely formatted description of what the site does and why the student would want to login to use it.

• Stick to fontawesome for icons unless you really need something different.

Some process issues:

• Everyone should add their profile photo to HuBoard so it is easy to tell who is assigned to which issues.

• Everyone should always be assigned at least one issue they are working on and one issue that is “ready” for them to work on once they finish the one they are currently working on. I will check your HuBoards occasionally to see if that’s true.

• I did not review the GitHub home page and wiki pages for M1, but these will be looked at for M2.

• Try add GitHub integration to your Slack teams so you get a notification whenever anyone commits.

Milestone presentation behavior:

• Some people left class after their milestone presentation was done. That was very disrespectful to the other students. If you do that again, you will get no credit for that milestone.

This assessment evaluates the ability of students to create the second Milestone deliverable.

This assessment evaluates the ability of students to create the third Milestone deliverable.