Record playlist JS1 Week 2

[Dedekind561]

Content

Objectives and topics covered in this section

Booleans and comparison operators ( 8 mins ) - Altom

• What are boolean types?
• Save boolean types into variables
• Show the typeof operator with booleans
• What are comparison operators?
• Why do we need to use comparison operators?

Conditionals ( 6 mins ) - Mitch

• What is a conditional?
• Show an example of an if statement
• Show an example of an if..else statement?

Logical operators ( 5 mins ) - Altom

• What are logical operators
• Show an example using &&, ||, and !

Iteration ( 6 mins ) - Mitch

• What is iteration?
• Why do we need to use loops in our code?
• Show a while loop example

Other ways of doing things ( 6 mins ) - from while to for

• Using for loops instead of while loops
• Show example refactoring while loop into a for loop

[gregdyke]

How are you getting on with this? Can I suggest you move for (let i = 0; i<10; i++) style for loops to the "other ways of doing things" last video. I think while and for of are great loopers and for is just unnecessarily complex for beginners (and they won't often write them anyway during the course)

I have some availability for recording if that would be useful?

[Dedekind561]

Hi @gregdyke , I just transferred this issue to another repo - @AltomHussain and I are working on this issue. We'll let you know when it's done so you can create another set of prep exercises as discussed previously

[gregdyke]

@Dedekind561 @AltomHussain I've looked through your week 2 recordings. What a great job!

I particularly liked

• Making predictions + Altom explaining the importance of doing that. It's great that we are modelling that in these videos!
• The conversation about iteration and the way Altom suggests we bring in a variable to represent how many times we went through the while. That is such a great way of explaining what is about to happen/why we are doing it!
• The explanation of comments //
• The transition from == to === is very smooth and well explained

Some general thoughts

• I would have liked better continuity from week to week: we have seen template strings, we have seen variable assignment, we have seen the REPL, we have not yet seen arrays, we have not yet seen any navigating in the terminal. I think it's really important to signpost to trainees: "this new" and "this is something you should already know". But, not having the continuity makes it less clunky to shift material about, so maybe we need to discuss our best practices for the tradeoff between continuity/spaced repetition and modularity
• if is not very "real world" useful without some kind of variability: user input or iteration. And iteration isn't very useful without something to iterate over. Maybe we should in the future try arrays -> iteration -> conditionals (and where do booleans fit in this??? they also aren't useful except for the condition in conditionals/iteration)

Things that I think you could/should address with additional recordings as intro/alternative ways of doing things

• console.log with multiple arguments. This is new and should be briefly explained
• terminal commands: This is the first time navigating in the terminal and a "we know you're learning this for the first time, here's what pwd ls cd and clear do"
• the order of the videos in the playlist is currently wrong -> I assume that's easily fixable, but I think I don't have permissions to do so.
• ctrl-c to exit infinite loop
• is now the time to mention who we write programs for -> other programmers -> that's why we have comments, naming of variables?
• is now the time to mention the camelCase convention?
• if you wanted to cut some material, maybe the % operator was a bit much (though I'd love to keep it for FizzBuzz! -> let me know what you decide?)

Things I wish you had done differently (sorry, there is a lot, but that's only because you did such a close-to-perfect job!)

• naming convention for boolean variable names doesMitchLikePizza (I can't think of a name for this that starts with isXxxxx in this particular case)
• num1 is almost never a good variable name -> not having meaningful variable names is a "code smell" for us not having a meaningful example.
• the explanation of while (and of if) could have pointed to its use in code.org (though I think we used repeat x times so maybe it's the wrong place)
• sunIsOut === true usually indicates to me that trainees don't understand conditionals very well, so I would avoid teaching it. (I'll put in some practice where we notice that sunIsOut === true evaluates to sunIsOut)
• admitting that =, == and === look similar and explaining that one of them is assignment and the other two are comparison operators (this would also have been helped if we'd spent more time on = not being an operator in week 1)
• the booleans video could have happenend directly in the REPL, so that we are not so dependent on console.log.
• I would have skipped typeof (as that was the choice we made for week 1), or used it in the REPL (I'll put in some practice of examining the typeof various things in the REPL)

[gregdyke]

Also, wondering what you'll put in the "additional ways of doing things" materials? else if and for (let foo; foo<10; foo++) ?

[gregdyke]

Did we cover the ! logical operator? Should we?

[gregdyke]

Also wondering if for of would be a good thing to cover -> the we could for each character of a string? (Generally we haven't done much with string manipulation with the methods on string, but Glasgow used them heavily in past cohorts)

[Dedekind561]

Thank you for providing this detailed feedback - all the points are very thorough and helpful. Due to time constraints, I'm not going to be able to action everything here.but it's still super good we've got this record so we can apply these changes if/when we re-record in the future and for future recordings. Things that are immediately actionable though:

• I'm going to remove % from the conditionals section
• I'm going to add a video on learning objectives/additional context and what's new - help to frame the context we're about to deliver
• Yeah we threw them in to YouTube in no particular order - I'm going to re-order them soon. Unfortunately I'm not a channel owner so I don't have permissions to update the order so I'll create a new playlist and flag it it as v2 or something like that.

console.log with multiple arguments. This is new and should be briefly explained

Complete agree, should have provided more clarity. Will see if I can add a clarifying note to the video

Terminal commands: This is the first time navigating in the terminal and a "we know you're learning this for the first time, here's what pwd ls cd and clear do"

Completely agree. May have time to add a clarifying note here too. In the future, the video recording plan should mention what's new / what's not new.

[Dedekind561]

I would have liked better continuity from week to week: we have seen template strings, we have seen variable assignment, we have seen the REPL, we have not yet seen arrays, we have not yet seen any navigating in the terminal. I think it's really important to signpost to trainees: "this new" and "this is something you should already know". But, not having the continuity makes it less clunky to shift material about, so maybe we need to discuss our best practices for the tradeoff between continuity/spaced repetition and modularity

Been thinking about this:

• Might be a good idea for those being recorded to announce very clearly: "Now we're going to use the REPL, OK this is something you've seen before ..." <- this sort of section is then very easy to remove from a video. So there is a little extra work in editing the video but this isn't massively onerous in my view. And then we get the benefit of continuity.

[Dedekind561]

Things to note:

• for..of will be show in the video on arrays. But not in this section. Same for standard for loop. Think they'll be able to get away with using just while loops here.

[gregdyke]

Also noting that multiple returns from if in functions is a new concept that we don't teach to the best of my knowledge (it's in some of the exercises)

[gregdyke]

Also wondering how annoying / hard else if is to learn on top of if and else