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.

Alison : The Online Teacher

     Alison in my opinion is a decent at best option to get certified in any online course. It does not really teach everything very clearly in the sense that it assumes that you already know most of the details behind the course you are taking. In my opinion a codecademy type website teaches much better. It is much more thorough and much more learning base. That is one huge downside to the Alison certification process. It has a lot of content and it does not offer much chance for interaction. By saying this i mean that Alison uses mainly videos and definitions to teach the user about his or her course. I think this is very bad because most people can not learn off of just videos without doing any practice problems. It is mostly conceptually based. Also another downside to the Alison course I took was that the final assessment has the same questions. I think this is bad because someone could easily get certified without actually learning anything. For my learning experience i had to take notes to make sure that i was understanding all of the content. This leads me to me third downside to Alison, as mentioned earlier, there is a lot of content. This wouldn't be bad usually but in Alison, all of this content is crammed in to 8-11 mini courses. For my course there was a total of 23 hours worth of videos. I did not even watch 10 hours, i only watched three full hours and i still was able to get certified. This also shows how the final assessment does not cover all the topics that the course presents in its tutorials.

     Be that as it may, Alison does have some Pros. If you have enough time to go through all of the content thoroughly and completely and take notes as well(which is a lot of work, maybe around 30 hours) then i do believe that Alison does do a good job of teaching. Within the video tutorials there is a lot of information, useful information, and if you can understand it all then yes Alison would be a great tool. Another great aspect of Alison is that it has so many courses to choose from. When i typed in Android development, for my topic alone there were around 10 courses. This is very good because it allows many people with different interests to get certified. Lastly Alison is a very rewarding process. This is beneficial on a physiological point of view. Yes it is true that it is a lot of work, and yes it might get a little bit boring after 3 hours of watching tutorials, but when you finish the course and get certified, you feel very accomplished. That is my favorite Pro of Alison, the self reward.

     Moving away from the topic of certification courses, lets talk about my final project. As I mentioned previously, I plan to present my final app to the class. With all of my resources and pictures from codecademy, I also plan to walk my class through my own learning experience. I will have a series of pictures that i have amassed throughout the course, and when i show the class i plan explain step-by-step what the major aspects of JavaScript I learned, and how that aspect is used in coding, and why it is useful. For my final app, i plan to just download it onto my phone and show the class how you can interact with it, and what the purpose is. This part will be a very basic demonstration because the app itself is a very basic tutorial.

#glitchless

As my blogs title probably suggests, I have worked out almost all of the known glitches in the game. The big one being the victory screen portraits and the inverted palette glitch. Now that I have fixed these issues inside the fighter factory software I have been able to reinsert the broken characters into the game. The game is now much closer to completion than ever before and my list of things to do before the games completion is much smaller now.

Recently we had a google hangout where we got to answer some questions about our progress on our independent projects. We started by discussing what we would be presenting and showing for the final presentation. My final presentation topic is the fighting game I developed using MUGEN and how I have progressed through learning how the software works and developing an engine. Afterwards we talked about the artifacts and resources we used in our process of developing each of our projects. The artifacts used for the game I developed were the MUGEN software, Fighter Factory, and several sprite packs. Fighter factory is a program where all resources can be compiled, edited and organized. Using this program I was able to edit many of my resources to work properly with the game. I also used several websites and tutorials to help in the process of completing the game. There were also several challenges that we had discussed during the google hangout. My main challenges have been to make a balanced roster so that no one character can be overpowered. Some glitches have also given me issues but they haven't been as big of a deal as the balancing of the characters. I also talked about the help I was able to receive from many of the other class members. They helped me test the game throughout its production. Finally the last few things I need to do to finish the project are the arcade mode and the AI to go with it and to finalize the character roster.

Seeing as my recent purge of many of the games glitches below I will have some pictures of before and after the removal of one of the most annoying glitches I had to fix.

Before:

After:

#betaswag

Over the past few weeks, my todo list has grown, but many items have been crossed off since. I also added social links to the bottom, and I made some really cool styling for the todo list using pesudo-elements (::before and ::after). I also remade my gallery, and it works very well. I decided to not use core-list. The bugs left on my site are fairly minor points, and I have finished most of the functionality on my experiments. these are mostly style bugs at this point.

 

The End Is Near

     Since my last blog,  I haven't done much in the territory of finishing my project, but what i have gotten far in is planning my final steps and collecting all of my final resources to finish my project. My final project is to complete the tutorial of building an app on Android Studio, so far this has been going really well. I did in fact take a very roundabout route to this goal because I had no prior knowledge of coding or programming whatsoever. So if I just started that tutorial all by itself without constructing a background, it would have been very hard, so I opted to learn the basis for JavaScript, and then Eli agreed to explain to me all of the differences between Java and JavaScript because Android studio actually is programmed in Java. I have recently just finished my codecademy course and Eli has in fact taught me the differences, but he will have to do it again because there were some complicated ones. So as of now i have Android Studio ready and i have in fact created my first Hello world app, although it is the most simple app possible. It just displays “Hello World”

The several artifacts i have collected for this project so far is some programming links that i have saved in a separate google doc, I have also acquired my major tutorial for this semester which was codecademy.com. I actually feel that it was very helpful because it has many hints if you need them along the way. Lastly I have downloaded Android studio and I am currently using the starting tutorial. So far I have had many challenges, but I would say that my one very big challenge was functions. I honestly spent a lot of time on that section and i received extensive help from Eli as well. Also another big challenge for me is syntax. It is not as important in JavaScript, but if I forget ; in Java or if I forget brackets and parenthesis, the code will not run what so ever.

Thankfully I have Eli to help me, Eli has taught me an extensive amount in syntax on JavaScript and how important it is. He has also explained to me many of the differences between java and JavaScript so that I could actually begin the final stages of my final project, and i am sure he will continue to help me as i progress through the final stages. To finish my project, basically all I have left to do is finish the tutorial on how to build my first app in android...this should take me to the end of the semester