Lab 9
Jillian Howarth
April 29, 2017
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What is this purpose of this Git repository? (duh!)
The purpose of this Git Repository is hold my COMP 20 labs and projects.
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What was your favorite lab or assignment and why?
- My favorite assignment was Assignment 3. I I enjoyed setting up and accessing the MongoDB server and also felt it brought everything else in the course together. After completing Assignment 3, I finally understood all the different pieces of Assignment 2 and felt like I understood web programming enough to be able to build a full web application. - It also helped my final project group move forward with the back-end/database part of our project.
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How much do you think you have grown from day 1 of this course to now?
- When I began the course, I had previously used HTML and CSS but did not know how the web works, JavaScript, how to use a server, how to connect to a database, web security, etc. In addition to learning these topics, I think I learned how to think about the web. Now when I look at web pages, I can think about things like security and actually understand what is happening. - I also learned how to work and compromise with other people during the group project. In particular, we struggled to compromise on functionality and our implementation priorities and had to learn to work through that. I learned a lot about communication and dealing with group members who don't participate as well during this project.
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What was the most important thing that you learned in this course? Cite two examples as evidence.
- I think the most important thing I learned during this project was how to work on Computer Science projects with other people. Of course I also learned web programming, but that is something I could have learned on my own from the Internet, whereas it's difficult to create a long-term project environment to practice working with other people. - Before this course, I had never written code with another person. During the semester group project, I've learned both how to write code that is can easily be understood and modified by other people as well as how to read other peoples' code and continue from where they left off. A specific case of where this happened is one of my teammates created the basic HTML, CSS, and JS files for several pages, but I needed to add in a pop-up box with the instructions for our game. This involved modifying existing JS code and add JS template scripts to the HTML file without duplicating or overwriting the existing code. - I've also learned quite a lot about communication during this group project. Two of my group members are super communicative (and also close friends) so planning times to meet with them and getting responses to messages wasn't a problem. The two other members of my group are far less communicative and we struggled to get them to attend meetings or respond to our messages. One of the big things I took away from this is that people have different communication styles and preferences. One of the teammates who wouldn't attend meetings or respond to messages about meeting up, but would respond almost immediately if we were talking about the actual web application or code. Additionally, he always did he work consistently well and on time, so I learned to step back and check in with him less. We really were not able to get the other group member to be engaged so we learned it was best to stop catering to him and constantly bugging him/asking for his opinion and rather that it worked better to let him come to us and chime in when he had something to contribute.
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Now that you have finished the course, what topic would you like to delve deeper into?
- While JavaScript is a frustrating and inconsistent language (that caused me plenty of problems during the course), it seems to have a lot of capabilities and I would like to explore that more. In particular, I would like to explore interaction options and animations to make web applications more engaging for the user (particularly with the speed and shape of transitions between objects and web pages as the cursor moves, scrolls, hovers, and clicks).