Jim's
Tutorials

Spring 2019
course
site

nate and I have pretty much divided stuff as follows: I talk the whole time, nate helps people and helps get everything set up. It seems to be working so far. It's been cool to have to practice what I say beforehand about certain concepts. I think this is great practice talking about coding. for example I talked about string concatenation and interpolation, which is not really a tricky subject, but had to put it in the context of data manipulation and what that is and the significance of that.So I told them there are situations where you'd put your first name and last name in a form and it would display concatenated- etc, I try to give them good examples of real-life usage of some of the concepts we are running by them instead of just throwing information into their faces and expecting them to appreciate this. I had them add space between concatonated words, literally just to practice being nitpicky about things like having to manually insert spaces, running your code, seeing you made your sentances wrong and having to do it all over again. I showed them variables and had them make blah = "pie" and add "pizza" + blah and you get "pizza pie" so they can get an idea of the abstract idea of variables and how they are containers that point to values. showed them a typer error that occured when I showed them what happens when you try to add an integer and a string together. Talked about errors and how they are just as important as the code, and are not nescessarily somethng we need to be afraid of, we need t o welcome errors because we are developrs and sleuths and errors are our clues that let us move forward. I talked to them about deriving any meaning they can from errors, even if they don't understand most of what they are looking at so we took a good long pause and gave proper attention to this error message instead of brushing it off as something that was a mistake or accidental.

I told them about searching strings and wrote the following notes for that;

A lot of the most important work computers do is cataloging and searching data. AI is going through hugh collections of data about  people and things and behavior patterns and writing down how many things happen and predictions based on that. If you wanted  to advertize something on amazon- all those target advertisements you see on facebook are coming from people cataloging your data and searching  it and retreaving it and putting it in front of you. Thats what this whole facebook scandle was about - facebook

I had these notes about substrings and wher eyou might see that applied in real life:


So if you think of google, they  are  searching substrings-  you type in part of the  sentence you’re searching and google is looking  at  that sentence and giving you  results that closely  match it. Form validation, when you want to check that someone put their first and last name into a form, into  their online checking ccount before you allow them to withdraw money. This  is  part of the larger picture of data validation and searching that  is really  important  in coding.

I showed them this to give them an idea of what a real codeblock looks like, because i think they need to be introduced to these concepts as soon as possible. I let them know to be ok with not understanding w hat they see. I introduced them to the concept that a

tag makes everything inside of it able to be made into a form, like what we put our names in, and that you'd need to validate it using this substring stuff and searching stuff we've been talking about. I showed them what an alert would mean, they are kind of starting to see how these words and random tags might result in some actions online that they are familier with like alert windows and error messages

function validateForm() {
  var firstName = document.forms["myForm"]["firstName"].value;
  if (firstName == "") {
    alert("Name must be filled out");
    return false;
  }
}



orm> <label for="choose">Would you prefer a banana or cherry?</label> <input id="choose" name="i_like" required> <button>Submit</button> </form>

..I also wanted to show them two examples t o highlight that there are lots of different ways to say these things. that there are different languages and different syntaxes and again, reminding them they are learning ruby.

I also had the girls class and just set up a little table for them and talked about how its important for them to stay involved in this and know what coding is about at least, even if we have a shorter amount fo time to meet between us. I said we have less time but I'll keep you up more or less, and the important thing is this is giving you context for the rest of your time in school and if you want to choose this as acreer you have been introduced to it unlike a lot ofgirls who don't try it

there is only one girl in my other class, (outside of the girls' class) and she is definitey my favorite and I think she's quite brave to have stuck with this so I've tried to be friendly towards her and she waves and smiles and she really does like coding and likes to hear she is doing a good ob, which she is. this is very rewarding.