In-Depth Blog Post #5

Welcome to my fifth In-Depth blog post.

 

Learning opportunities:

My mentor is a software engineer, so naturally, has expertise in software development and networking. She’s currently helping me program a game in Python, which has proven to be very interesting. Through this I’ve been exposed to programming, which is a field that I have known about for a while, though never really learned much about. My mentor also provides me learning opportunities is many different coding languages other than Python, like Golang or C/C++. My mentor can also expose to learning opportunities in networking, which I know practically nothing about.

 

Learning opportunities to reinforce new learning:

After learning about Python, or any other languages my mentor has experience in, I can use my learning to learn more. For example, because the same coding principles in a lot of different languages, I can learn them more easily. In other words, I can use my learning to learn new, useful languages like HTML/CSS. The reason these languages are very useful is because I can use them to visualize my game. So, after I’ve finished the game, I can use my learning from coding to visualize the game myself. Another direction I could go is to learn more advanced coding in Python, because currently my knowledge is simple.

 

Opportunities to accelerate learning:

If I want to learn any of what I mentioned previously, like advanced Python or HTML/CSS, I could use resources like tutorials on YouTube or websites like W3schools. These tutorials are there specifically for accelerating learning and learning new code very quickly. Some of these tutorials also have certificates you can get from them, which can be used on resumes if I ever pursue. Another way I could accelerate learning is to ask some of my other family members to help me. A lot of my family has coding in their job or at least has a good knowledge about it. This would be easy access to learning and an enjoyable one at that.

 

What do we talk about?

When my mentor and I talk about in-depth, we usually talk about the assignments I was given, recent progress, or where we want to go next. Recently, we’ve been specifically talking about my assignment, which was making an item in the game, and designing the code for it. We talked about the problems we found with it, and how it related to the rest of the section of code. Another topic we always discuss is whether we want to invest time into making nice visuals or making a generator for the labyrinth. The generator would be extremely difficult, but in my mentor’s area of expertise. The visuals would be outside of my mentor’s expertise but would be easier to learn. Currently, the decision is leaning towards visuals.

 

What’s going well in our relationship:

We both know where we want to take our project and what we want to do immediately. I also think that we both understand each other very well. One main problem that’s been solved in our relationship is that I used to not ask many questions. After my mentor used to explain part of code, I would sometimes be reluctant to ask questions. Whether it was because I thought it was stupid, or I didn’t want to make my mentor explain too much. However, we had a small conversation after I realized that I didn’t understand those specific parts of code, and we made sure I would ask questions if I don’t understand anything at all. Now that I understand all of the code, I and able to understand what my mentor is talking about all the time.

 

What we are learning about each other:

There isn’t much for me to learn about my mentor, as she is my mom, and I’ve lived with her all my life. What I’ve learned about her through the project, is just more about what she does when she worked, which is the part of her life I’m not always there to see. I only learned about how she works and what skills she needs to use to be good at what she does.

 

Progress:

We have almost finished making the game more complex, and now we will either make visuals, or code the game further. The screenshots of the code are below.