ga-wdi-boston/js

PVD Delivery

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nayana487 commented

For this lesson, I actually primarily worked off the DC JS basics lesson: https://github.com/ga-wdi-lessons/js-intro but I did make some adjustments based on what was in this Boston lesson. I have taught the DC lesson a few times and also contributed a good deal to writing it, so I knew at this point that it's a successful lesson and one I'm very comfortable delivering.

  • After the section in the DC lesson where the role of JS is discussed, I talked about what ES6 is and how we got here. A lot of what I talked about regarding ES6 can be found under framing in this lesson here: https://github.com/ga-wdi-lessons/es6 . I then went back to the DC lesson under the setting up our environment section. In total, this took a little over an hour but a lot of that is because my style of lecture tends to be more conversational and it's most important for me to make sure the students leave lectures with a sense of why we're doing things the way we are now, how we got here, what problems are we solving.

  • I did explicitly teach them about const and let, which wasn't included in the DC lesson. I told them how they differ from var but didn't go into block scoping.

  • I then had them go through the exercises in the DC repo but told them to sub in const and let for var where appropriate and to be deliberate when deciding which one to use.

  • I also encouraged them to use the console and scripts when running code. I thought it was good for them to get exposure to using both. I didn't have them use node. I knew Ben was going to have them use that in his lesson and the Boston lesson doesn't have them doing much in the console, but personally, I use it all the time.

  • after the loops and fizzbuzz section, I realized they were struggling to understand how they should solve a coding problem. So I went over fizzbuzz with them and showed them how I would solve it...writing pseudocode, breaking down a larger problem into smaller steps, writing a few lines of code at a time and constantly testing (ie have a console.log() display at the start just to make sure we have our script file linked properly. I referenced this lesson for that: https://github.com/ga-wdi-lessons/pseudocode. I also encouraged them to go through this in its entirety before working on their homework.

  • I'm not crazy about how use strict and require are mentioned in this lesson if it's not explicitly clear that we're supposed to be teaching the students what this is. I find that students tend to get distracted by extras like these and then don't fully grasp the fundamentals we need to make sure they have a strong grounding on.