CS373 Fall 2021: Thomas Connor Thompson: Final Entry

How well do you think the course conveyed those takeaways?

I think this course was really effective in getting me to understand and leave with these ideas. Using the quizzes, and exercises to practice the concepts with other people to consult within real-time really helped in my understanding.

Were there any other particular takeaways for you?

I think another takeaway from this class was how important it is to think about your code before writing it. You want to have things planned out so that you can keep things consistent throughout your codebase and this will really help you in situations where you have iterative development.

How did you feel about cold calling?

I think it’s a good way to incentivize attendance and paying attention in class while also sort of maximizing how much time Professor Downing can spend lecturing. We don’t have to take 10 minutes to run like a class survey to judge engagement but rather have someone just follow along with the professor as we go through the points we need to learn.

How did you feel about specifications grading?

I was skeptical of it at first, but I did end up enjoying it. It sort of feels like there is less pressure to perform perfectly on assignments, and just make sure you understand the material to be able to do well.

How did you feel about help sessions and office hours?

There were many help sessions and office hours and it always felt like they were around when I needed them, and that was especially important for the IDB projects.

How did you feel about the support from the TAs?

The weekly meetings were a great way of keeping our group on track and keeping all members of my group engaged.

What required tool did you not know and now find very useful?

Other than Docker which I really liked learning about, I think selenium opens up a lot of uses even outside of just testing, utilizing the web browser driver.

What’s the most helpful Web dev tool that your group used that was not required?

We used Material UI for our front-end and it helped make things sort of pretty by default. It took a little time to learn how to use it properly but it was a great front-end tool.

How did you feel about your group having to self-teach many, many technologies?

It was honestly pretty time-consuming and frustrating at times, but I think the CATME sorted us into a group where any weakness I felt was covered by someone else who was knowledgeable. It was great seeing our collective knowledge come together as we worked on our group projects.

Give me your suggestions for improving the course, but apologies in advance; specifications grading will remain.

The only way I think I see of improving this course is to maybe change some of the perusal assignments around to maybe help with developing the IDB project. I think some of the papers were very similar to each other or could be summarized a bit better as fewer assignments, leaving room for some readings on some of the best ways to implement our IDB.