In-Depth Blog Post #3

Hello!

This is my third blog post talking about my in-depth project.

I have been working hard to learn new skills and continue my journey to programming.

 

Progress Update

Since my last update, I have learned plenty of new skills and commands on the computer. My mentor has recommended a tutorial I should use, just to learn the basic things. The website is codecademy.com . I recently finished the first chapter of the program, and now I am learning commands like var, const, and let. The thing that is confusing me the most is the math commands. I am just generally not the best at math, but when I am learning it in a way that is also new to my brain, it is even more confusing. Luckily, I can always ask my dad for help if my mentor is not available at that moment.

 

Mentor Update

My mentor and I have been communicating back and forth either through email or texting. She has been so helpful, and so understanding whenever I have a question. We haven’t had a lot of time to talk, because she is a very busy person. She has a toddler, a dog, and is pregnant. Her husband also works. So we are both working together to make sure she isn’t over working herself, and she won’t be rushed or stressed because of this project. She was so kind to take time out of her busy schedule to help me and I greatly appreciate that.

 

Some Struggles I Have Had

I have found that coding is somewhat simple, but also very complex. Coding is very step-by-step, especially java, the language I am coding in. I like this because my brain works very step-by-step as well. I have a very hard time understanding things that I don’t know the process of. Some people will be able to know and memorize the solution to something without knowing any of the logic behind it, but I’m not like that. I have to know why something works to fully understand things. I think the hardest thing for me so far is the math portion of coding. There are many commands that have different meanings, but there are a lot of math related ones, and I briefly mentioned it before, but math is not my strong suit, and those commands are very confusing to me.

 

How To Have A Beautiful Mind

This weeks chapters are discussing ‘how to be interesting, and how to respond.” I tried to incorporate this into our talks by starting off with something that we liked, and why we like that thing. I think this eased up the tension a bit because we both felt more comfortable (not that we weren’t in the first place). We also talked about how Andrea, (my mentor) got into coding, and why she is so passionate about it. When I asked her this she said –

“I like how quickly you can see the results of code you’ve written. Code is very powerful and can do a lot of things and it’s rewarding to see the effects of what you’ve done almost immediately. Other careers are not necessarily like that. For example doctors could spend a lot of time treating patients and it’s not guaranteed to show results and sometimes results take a long time to appear. I also appreciate that on average a career in software is well-paid and has flexible working hours and conditions which is extremely great for raising a family.”

I found this very interesting because I had never thought of it that way before. This is when the next part came into play. I used the strategy of acknowledging how I found it interesting. This was she won’t think that I was just not listening to her, and it will make her feel heard, which I like. Then I was able to branch off into other topics that related to the previous question. I asked a number of ‘what if’ questions that allowed me to learn more in-depth (pun fully intended) about coding.

 

Goals

My goal right now is to learn the rest of chapter 2 in the coding tutorial program and move onto chapter 3. I would also like to try and use my currently mere knowledge and try and experiment and write some very, very simple lines of code. Just so I can get a feel for how everything works.

 I hope you enjoyed reading about my in-depth project so far! Have a good day!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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