(“How to Have a Beautiful Mind” chapters 6-7)

These meetings with my mentor so far have been mainly scheduled around these blog post assignments, however, this time he has brought to my attention a concern of his regarding me keeping him up to date with what is going on.

He felt that he hasn’t fully grasped what the goals of this project is in the long run, and will most likely be able to help me more with that kind of information. I hadn’t realized this was an issue until now so I thanked him for bringing it to my attention. I told him about these progress reports, but also that I think that this project was more about the journey and that by the end I am able to produce a final project, with examples of what I learned and improved on.

He suggested that I should start involving him with more than just our regular meetings to keep us on the same page, so we decided that every weekend, I will shot him a message, even when meeting up isn’t necessary that week. I acknowledge that my mentor is a busy person, and won’t take for granted the time he is volunteering for me.

Clarification on learning materials (specifically W3Schools.com)

As I continue to move up on Khan Academy, I decided to go back to look at another resource that he gave me a while back, because I wasn’t learning at that level just yet. I read a little bit from W3Schools.com and their approach to teaching the language is much different than what I was used to, as they provide an already coded site that you can play around with, but I still felt like I was missing something.

My mentor decided to take this opportunity to show off some of his own little projects, one being a random generator of items in a list that you could allter by pushing buttons, and he told me to start with something very simple, find it online and by next meeting show him what I’ve been able to come up with. From there he might tell me to change around certain things to fully understand how it works.

W3Schools is a gigantic platform to learn from, but I mentioned before that it focussed on building websites with code, which is not quite what I am looking for. I mentioned this to him and he explained that it is a lot more informative, and he agrees that I should be practicing on my own, which is why he prefers Code.org.

This one is more of practicing with what is called block coding, but there is a feature that can switch the code to regular JavaScript to see what it looks like in both formats. Overall, it is more similar to Khan Academy, and I think that I will try out that website for the next little bit, and maybe have to go back a bit once I do decide to go back to Khan Academy.

Although making websites like these is not quite what I am focussing on right now, I still think that it is really cool with how many possibilities there actually are. He told me that this and drawing with JavaScript isn’t all that different and that I can apply a lot of the knowledge to other forms of JavaScript like this. That conversation gives me a good idea of a possibility to fully explore the language and maybe one day be able to make real games.