Reflection

There are no readings for this week. However, I would still like you to think about and submit a summary+question. This is a chance for you to reflect on this course, and on where you see yourself going in the future.

Summary

For this week’s summary, think back over the class. What have you learned? Do you feel somewhat more confident with programming and with computers than you did before? Do you feel like you could talk with other programmers about the work they do? What skills do you think you understand pretty well? What skills do you feel like you still need to learn?

You’ve learned a lot over the course of the semester. One thing that might help you to see how far you’ve come is to look at the code you wrote for the labs and studios early in the semester. You probably understand some of that code better now than you did then. Try to remember what things you found hard to do in September and October. Are those things easier now?

Prompt: Summarize what you feel like you’ve learned in this course.

Question

For the question part of the course, think about how you might use these skills in the future. How do you think you might use the skills you learned in your future courses? Or in your future career? Or in your future life? Are you already using the skills from this course in interesting and valuable ways?

As usual, submit your summary and question before class starts on Tuesday.

Going Forward

If this course was interesting to you, there are more programming courses you can take in the Media and Information department and elsewhere. I recommend MI 349 (web development) and MI 320 (reasoning with data). You can also learn a lot by practicing programming on your own. This article about teaching yourself to code has a lot of good suggestions and resources if you want to continue practicing your programming skills.

My best advice if you want to practice on your own is to start a project that’s directly interesting to you. Interested in sports? Write a program that calculates sports statistics or that notifies you when your favorite team is about to start playing. Interested in books? Write a program that helps you to track the books you’ve read or pulls information from a book API about different books and authors. Interested in games? Start making one, or reproduce an existing game that you enjoy. (Fun fact: the game Stardew Valley exists because the creator wanted to teach himself to program and did so by recreating his favorite game from when he was a kid, Harvest Moon.) If you’re legitimately interested in the program you’re writing, you’ll be more likely to want to work on it, and you’ll learn more because you’re spending time on it.