Js1 week4 update lesson plan #200
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I think these exercises might be way too hard. What do you think?
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I don't find them too hard at all. For a student that wants to advance, this should be an appropriate challenge!
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Good, then we just have to make sure the students challenge themselves and don't just stay in the shallow end of the pool.
| * 🧱 **Implement New Code** | ||
| * **Goal**: Design, implement, and test a solution from scratch, ensuring it meets requirements and functions correctly. | ||
| * 🔎 **Troubleshoot Issues** | ||
| * **Goal**: Efficiently identify and resolve errors in code without introducing new issues. | ||
| * ✨ **Review Existing Code** | ||
| * **Goal**: Read and understand code that does not follow your own style, identify potential improvements, and refactor it without introducing unintended side effects. | ||
| * 🎓 **Learn New Concepts and Technologies** | ||
| * **Goal**: Independently learn and understand new concepts and technologies, and effectively communicate your knowledge to others. |
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Do you agree on these categories?
Do the icons make sense or would it be better to just remove?
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very nice, and good to visually classify with icons. 👍🏽
| * 🎓 **Learn New Concepts and Technologies** | ||
| * **Goal**: Independently learn and understand new concepts and technologies, and effectively communicate your knowledge to others. |
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How can we better encourage trainees to "teach" the mentors what they learned, to train their communication skills.
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I'm thinking how people use these skills in a real job... some starting ideas:
- Communicating tasks, problems and questions to someone they are pairing with on their team
- Making a presentation to talk through a new feature
- Sharing a quick learning during stand up
- Explaining changes in a pull request description
Maybe we can use these kinda real job situations to inspire how we can do it in our exercises.
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I like these ideas. How do you see that we best integrate them in our sessions @adamblanchard ?
- having the trainees do presentations could be great.
- Presentations can take significant time from the session which is often times already tightly packed
- it seems most trainees are quite shy. How do we best push them without making them overly uncomfortable?
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It feels easiest for me to think of them as threads throughout the whole program (maybe making this discussion a little bigger/out of scope of this PR in itself).
Example, with the presentations:
- Higlighting one key learning at the end of each session (quick fire, in a circle?)
- "Presenting" your solution to a mentor in the session (1on1)
- Explaining your changes (including why, learnings, challenges etc.) in every PR (should add a template for this)
- A couple of trainees giving a summary of their assignment (and what they learned during review) at the start of a session
- Presentation at the end of every project (try it recorded and in person)
- Mock technical interviews (talking through their code 1on1, with lots of questions and "what ifs").
That way we can "quickly" integrate practicing this skill which doesn't take much time away from the session, and shy people can slowly build up to the bigger experiences (like project presentations, which we would need to prioritise time for!).
I think my answer is still a little idealistic, I'm not suggesting anything specifically for this PR. Just answering your initial question :D
| * Solve 2 [warm-up exercises](./exercises/level0.md) to get started! 💪 You decide which. | ||
| * Solve 3 [regular exercises](./exercises/level1.md). 👩💻 You decide which. | ||
| * Solve 1 or more [hard exercises](./exercises/level2.md). 🥇 You decide which. | ||
| * **Bonus:** Solve 1 or more [very hard exercises](./exercises/level3.md). |
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I fear this is way too hard. What do you think?
| Goal for today: | ||
| * Solve 2 [warm-up exercises](./exercises/level0.md) to get started! 💪 You decide which. | ||
| * Solve 3 [regular exercises](./exercises/level1.md). 👩💻 You decide which. | ||
| * Solve 1 or more [hard exercises](./exercises/level2.md). 🥇 You decide which. | ||
| * **Bonus:** Solve 1 or more [very hard exercises](./exercises/level3.md). |
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I added explicit goals to encourage trainees to move on to harder levels rather than solving all the warm up exercises top-to-bottom
| ## Finishing class exercises | ||
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| Finish the exercises from the class! | ||
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| ## Codewars |
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Do we want to have code wars as a part of the home work? If so, we should probably tell them how to hand it in. I don't think they can share their account with their solutions.
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I think it's good to encourage them to get on there. For those that will continue, it's fun and gamified and marketable in job search.
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As a trainee, after having done many exercises in class and also having homework to do, I don't know how much importance I would give to these katas (which are also basic compared to some of the exercises).
I agree that these platforms are engaging for learning, but I don't see much value in this lesson.
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I think it is a personal preference.
The katas are definitely not basic, if you continue and choose the harder ones.
I used it as proof of practice in job search and got asked about it several times - because I had an impressive score at that time.
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I learned about CodeWars from HYF, and really like them. They introduce trainees early to tests, how to read tasks and execute on. Upon completion, they can learn by seeing the community voted best solutions.
However, there are also a few downsides:
- They already have another homework
- No haven't had very clear communication on how should they submit those
- Often I've seen committed code for CodeWars which is actually using other variable and function names and does not complete the requirement
- The majority of the trainees, especially those who lag behind, skip them altogether
If it was up to me to draft a decision, I'd either make them required or would completely remove them from the home assignments.
| ## Finishing class exercises | ||
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| Finish the exercises from the class! |
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I don't think the homework should depend on the class exercises. Different mentors might use their own lesson plan and exercises.
| #### Why Denmark Values Soft Skills Highly | ||
| - **Flat Organizational Structures**: Danish companies often have a flat structure, where developers are expected to take responsibility, communicate openly, and work closely with colleagues and managers. | ||
| - **Agile Methodologies**: Many Danish tech companies follow Scrum and other agile methodologies, where teamwork and communication are key to success. | ||
| - **Ownership and Participation**: Developers in Denmark are expected to take ownership of their tasks and actively participate in decision-making processes. | ||
| - **Consensus Culture**: Denmark has a strong consensus culture, meaning that decisions are often made through discussion and mutual agreement. This requires good communication skills, collaboration, and the ability to consider different perspectives. | ||
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It'd be nice to add some links on this topics. I've read about it on forums but maybe there are some more "official" ones.
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+1, a link or two to describe each of these in more detail would be nice for more context. It might be the first time people hear about e.g. consensus culture or agile/scrum.
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| # Lesson plan | |||
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Is there a reason this is formatted as code? It could be normal text, taking advantage of lists, better format, etc
| ## Finishing class exercises | ||
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| Finish the exercises from the class! | ||
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| ## Codewars |
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As a trainee, after having done many exercises in class and also having homework to do, I don't know how much importance I would give to these katas (which are also basic compared to some of the exercises).
I agree that these platforms are engaging for learning, but I don't see much value in this lesson.
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I think it's a better idea to update lesson-plan.md with the new content instead of creating a new additional lesson.md.
Then we keep the module structure consistent, and all change history can be seen in one file. In that case, it's fine to remove the "old material" in there since we can find it again if we need to in git history.
If we have no real intention to use that old material, let's keep it tidy :D
Co-authored-by: Marco Richetta <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Marco Richetta <[email protected]>
Summary
This PR updates the lesson material for Javascript 1 - week 4. The goal for this week is to have the trainees do a lot of exercises to hammer in the fundamentals taught in the previous weeks. 💯
It is easiest to go over the readme and the subpages here:
https://github.com/bhas/JavaScript-v2/blob/js1-week4-update/javascript1/week4/readme.md
Changes made:
What I like your opinion on:
Challenges identified from previous teachings