In-Depth Blog Post #4

Welcome back to my fourth in-depth blog post.

 

Most difficult mentoring challenge

So far, the learning has been going well, I’ve been enjoying the learning and moving closer towards a completed project. However there have been setbacks, the biggest one being distraction. When we are having lessons, sometimes I find myself zoning out and thinking about something irrelevant to the project. I didn’t think this would have too many consequences but recently I’ve been proven wrong. My last assignment my mentor gave me was to re-write some of the code we’ve used for the project, which I thought would be an easy task at first. It was in fact an easy task for the first little while, until I came to a part of the code that I had completely forgotten. I realized that while I was being taught this part of the code, I was likely being distracted, and therefore didn’t remember how it worked. So, I’ve decided I will try a new strategy which is to change my mindset and environment. Why I think the environment is the problem, is because this is where I usually play games and talk with my friends, and because of that, I’m used to being in a distracted mindset when I’m in that environment. I think this change of environment will be good for me and my mentor as well.

 

What’s going well

The best part of my learning so far has been my interest and intuition. Although I get distracted sometimes, I always know what I need to do next and how to add to the project. I think the main reason for this is my knowledge of what I want to do with the project very well, and I know what I want to do to make it more complex, or simpler. Another thing is that my mentor also knows about the project and tries to make it the way I envision it becoming. I had also tried to learn coding before, so my intuition is still good from then. My intuition is also better because my mentor explained to me how a computer comprehends what I write into the code, so I know what I need to add and what is unnecessary.

 

What could work better

I think something that could be improved on is my ability to write code on my own. The purpose of this project is for me to acquire a skill, and the skill I chose is to be able to code in python. However, at the moment I know what I want and need to write in python, but I need my mentor to tell me how to write it. The cause of this is mainly my lack of learning about all the functions and methods, but also my distraction while learning about these functions and methods. I think my solution to this is to watch some more tutorials to train my mind to think in the python language. That would help achieve me being able to write my ideas down in a way the program would work efficiently.

 

Progress:

Progress has been pretty good. My mentor and I have been focusing on the project more than anything else, and it’s been going very productively. We have now finished a simple, working version of the game, and it was very rewarding to see the game work, and seeing other people play it. It doesn’t have any visuals yet, so to play the game, a piece of paper is still required, but it’s been fun anyways. I’ve also learned about debugging, because almost any code will have bugs, and mine was no exception. Below are screenshots of the project so far.