I guess the first project that I could think of which I imagine quite a few other people would choose would be Erik’s first coding project. When I came here that class intimidated the most. I was sure I either; wouldn’t be able to do it, or I would be able to do it but would have to spend an inordinate amount of time working on it, so much so that everything else would suffer as a result. We got into the group project and me and my teamates all listed our coding experience and it was a collective 0 hours. I thought we were screwed.
Over the next couple weeks of instruction, we started turning out wireframes. Through the weekly critiques we could see the rest of the class for the most part was about where we were. One of my other groupmates was a little further along or understood the core concepts better so we would use hers in our demonstrations of our code which I was fine with but I just wished I was understanding the concepts better.
As we were making progress through the project, it became apparent that our wireframe would have to be changed or expanded upon. We just weren’t technically savvy enough to do what we drew out originally, so we each just kind of did our own coding for a weekend and came back together to see what we had. I spent the weekend finding a bunch of new CSS that would overall just make the site look maybe a bit more polished and for the last 2 weeks we were using my code for demonstrations which really felt good.
A lot of help from Erik in reinforcing concepts was essential in that project turning out good. As Abdul said, asking questions when you don’t know something is really important and I’ve always been good at that. I think on first impressions and just appearances Erik was really intimidating for a majority of the students, but he’s been arguably one of the best resources since coming here. Always made time when I had questions and giving the right amount of help, not spoon-feeding me the answers. Asking questions and being flexible and pivoting when the idea isn’t working have definitely been the two most helpful things I’ve done since coming to SCCA.