Al-e-son

This week, we had to do certifications about our respective projects. I did a certification on HTML5 from alison.com. I managed to skip the video and still answer the questions correctly, so I got the certification. It wasn't difficult at all. I would take an advanced JavaScript course, or an ECMAScript 5 course, or a Web Components course, but unfortunately this was not offered anywhere. I decided to do HTML5, but I regret not being able to do more.

In my final presentation I will show off my site, try to find old versions of the site, and talk about how I created most of my projects. I will also show off the resources I used, such as the polymer website, materialpalette, and several youtube videos. I will also show off the code and explain how I used to do certain things, but not any more.

No courses? No problem!

In the past few weeks I have been working on a course to improve skills needed to complete my independent project. Although I really knew everything I needed to complete the project, we were still asked to complete one of these. Unlike most people, my project topic was difficult to find a course on. I wasn't able to find one on the software I was using but I did find one based on fighting games in general. It was somewhat of help but it mostly taught me the essentials I already knew. I was surprised how little amount of free content and courses was on the web.

For my final presentation I probably will not include to much material based on this course. Ill probably mostly talk about my process of teaching myself this new software platform and having to create my own unique. The course was a nice refresh but it was not anything different or new that applied to my project. But in general my fighting game is on track to be very close to complete. Hopefully I wont run into to many problems as we enter the last few weeks of this class./

How Alison Broke My Heart

Over the past week, I've been working on a certification course from alison.com. Personally, I had trouble learning from it because of its format and content.

My notes, from before I got really lost

Here are some of the things I liked and disliked about alison.com's Javascript and jQuery certification course:

• I liked that it had lots of examples of different ways to use jQuery commands. In the future, if I need help understanding when to use a jQuery command, this will be one of the first places I look.
• I didn't like how it jumped right into each topic without explaining the terminology. For someone like me, without any background in Javascript, it quickly became hard to understand what each passage was referring to.
• I liked that the course conveniently provides a good amount of links to other resources, in case you want more specific documentation.
• I disliked that the course frequently went through multiple topics without a single line of explanation, only providing blocks of sample code.
• On a similar note, I disliked that the few exercises that were offered by the course had little to no direction--all they gave you was an end goal and one or two vague hints.
• Finally, and most importantly, I liked that it was free. Free stuff is good!

It stands for "freedom". God bless America!

Also over the past week, I've decided on what I'm going to do for my final project. I plan on making a webpage that contains some pictures and shapes that people can interact with and change. I'm looking forward to continuing my studies, and I hope to go above and beyond my current plans for the project.