Disclaimer:
Before you read the blog post, for some of the questions I answer, I am supposed to have recording clips of me and my mentor in a meeting as proof of me having agreeing, disagreeing, and differing. However, I didn’t provide those clips due to my mentor doesn’t wish to disclose any of his personal information or any recordings of our meetings. I respect my mentor’s decisions, and I won’t be showing any of the clips during the meeting, and you will just have to trust my word on some of this.
Progress Update
After my first In-Depth post, I’ve met with my mentor a total of 2 times so far.
In the first meeting, we went over my learning contract and what I planned to carry out during In-Depth this year, as well as helping me understand why a specific program worked.
In the second meeting, which occurred yesterday, I learned a bit about Unity and the various useful tutorials that I can find on the Unity website. I also figured out what I needed to know about C# programming before I moved on to Unity.
My mentor has been highly informative and helpful, and I have so far learned a quite a fair bit about coding from him. One of the things that I learned was that Unity had its own console commands separate from the normal C# commands you might see, which is really cool in my opinion
I’ve also completed a few more C# courses online, and I feel like I’ve got a decent idea of the basics of C#. However, I’m running into the problem that I’m forgetting what I learn. I think only with repetition, will I truly remember and learn how something works in C#. So, I’m planning to do more courses to memorize easier through repetition.
My mentor has also given me an assignment to complete before we have our next meeting. He told me to complete something called a “Fizzbuzz.” The problem is to write a program that will give you the numbers from 1 – 100. For each multiple of 3, have the program write “fizz,” and for each multiple of 5 to write “buzz.” However, if it’s both a multiple of 3 and 5, then have the program write “fizzbuzz.” It’s not a particularly hard problem to solve, but it does see if a programmer at least has a basic level of programming knowledge and skill. I hope that I will be able to do this assignment successfully and well.
How did my mentor and I agree?
Over the course of the 2 meetings, me and my mentor went over many concepts and proposed future courses of actions after I’ve completed all the courses, he provided to me. My mentor proposed that I should perhaps focus on the aspects of C# that focus on Unity and game design, like learning about the specific commands that Unity uses in coding scripts for its game engine. I thought it over in my head, and I found it a logical idea because I’m not learning how to code a website, but a game, and I know that some of the commands used in Unity scripting is different than what you’d normally find in normal C#. Also, I took in account that my mentor had more experience in both Unity and coding than me by a lot, so I knew that the information would be a good idea to consider. So, going off what I thought and knew, I agreed to this idea, confident in it being the right decision.
How did my mentor and I disagree?
Over the course of our 2 meetings, rarely have my mentor and I disagreed. The reason being that I know almost nothing of the subject I want to learn, and with my mentor being the one in our mentor-mentee relationship who has the most experience and knowledge of the subject, I almost always lacked the knowledge of the subject to be able to disagree with my mentor. I couldn’t disagree effectively in a topic which I knew nothing about with something who knew a lot about it, could I? However, even so, I do still sometimes disagree with my mentor, though. In this case, it was during my first meeting with my mentor, and we were discussing what I should do after I had completed the courses, he had supplied me with. My mentor said that if I finished the courses early, I should do repetitions of the skills I already know to gain more skill in using and applying them. However, I disagreed, saying that I should move on to Unity first if I finished early, because I thought I could still work on C# in conjunction with Unity. However, my mentor told me that as a beginner, repetition would be especially important to me because only with repetition can I truly remember and understand how something works in C#. I disagreed on his opinion because I thought that what he had suggested wasn’t an efficient idea because of my time constraints in the In-Depth project. I ended up agreeing with my mentor after he convinced me of his idea, and now thinking back on it, it was, indeed, the best course of action for me to take in the end.
How did my mentor and I differ?
Over the course of our 2 meetings, my mentor and I differed a good amount. Most notably, we differed when he asked me which software, I used to code my programs. During winter break, I had mainly used the software called “Visual Studio Code,” which I found very pleasing to look at and had the ability to add extensions to make it more personalized or have more functions. So, when my mentor questioned me about what software I had preferred, I responded with “Visual Studio Code,” as I just had more experience and time with it. However, my mentor differed, and said that he liked “Visual Studio” more. He differed because he had more experience than I did in using both software’s and knew that Visual Studio was superior to Visual Studio Code in some aspects. They understood my reasons for liking Visual Studio Code though and encouraged me to try both and compare them myself during my own time. I still haven’t gotten around to doing that though, but I hope to carry out this task very soon.
I’ll be posting my next blog post in the following 2 weeks, and I’m looking forward to continue improving my programming skill.