CS373 Fall 2021: Pamela Vazquez: Final Entry

• How well do you think the course conveyed those takeaways?

I think the course conveyed those takeaways extremely well.

• Were there any other particular takeaways for you?

My main key takeaway is start early. This is something that is so easy to say but pretty hard to follow through when everyone in your team also has many different responsibilities and projects they are trying to work on at the same time.

• How did you feel about cold calling?

I don’t mind the cold calling. I think for this class it helped me stay focused since the material we were learning in class did not have anything to do with the projects.

• How did you feel about specifications grading?

I can see how the specifications grading can be beneficial/ add some cushion to our overall grade in the class; yet I did not like how we could get a failing grade for our whole project if one thing went wrong.

• How did you feel about help sessions and office hours?

The help sessions and office hours were crucial for my team and I. I thought the TAs were really prepared most of the time and were super helpful/knowledgeable. Caitlin and Jefferson specifically were super helpful and nice :)

• How did you feel about the support from the TAs?

I think the TAs went above and beyond by making those how to articles for us. If it weren’t for them, it would have taken my team way longer to figure out how to do things like deploying and setting up elastic beanstalk.

• What required tool did you not know and now find very useful?

I had no prior experience React before taking this class. It was definitely a challenge not knowing React and I am still kind of puzzled by it but I am glad that I was heavily exposed to it through this class. I think all of the front-end teams would have benefited from just a react basics lecture.

• What’s the most helpful Web dev tool that your group used that was not required?

I thought Material UI was super helpful and easy to use. I saw other teams using different front-end frameworks but I thought this one was pretty easy.

• How did you feel about your group having to self-teach many, many technologies?

I think self-teaching is important and I think it is inevitable in every class and is good to know how to be inquisitive and resourceful but I think it can also hurt one’s knowledge. I think it can have negative effects because when you don't really know the tools you are using and have time constraints, it is easy to just find band-aid solutions to problems instead of fully learning what is going on. I think personally self-teaching each other react made me have an incohesive understanding of it.

• Give me your suggestions for improving the course, but apologies in advance; specifications grading will remain.

I think it would be super nice to have intro lectures to some of the tools that are heavily used in the projects. I know students who have no prior experience to tools like React would be grateful for at least some clear explanations of things like props, states and components are and how they are used.