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StarWars analogy pushed too far? #31

Open payne-chris-r opened 7 years ago

payne-chris-r commented 7 years ago

I freakin love the star wars example, but I don't want it to be there at the expense of the lesson.

Maybe instead of creating deathstars it should be 'moons' and deathStar and endor should be the things we create. Maybe we just wax this example and think of something with more pedagogical value?

jrhorn424 commented 7 years ago

I disagree with the sentiment, but not the desire.

There are good reasons to abandon examples, but I'm not sure this detracts from the training. We should gather data for questions like this.

At announcement time, for example, ask questions like: "How many of you are familiar with Star Wars?" and "If you aren't a Star Wars fan, how did you feel about using them as examples? Were they distracting?".

Sometimes learning something is hard because it's mind-bendy, no matter what our analogies are. I don't know if that's the case here.

I'm not opposed to changing any themes, but this is the sort of thoughtfulness I'd like to encourage for curricular decisions.

jrhorn424 commented 7 years ago

I'm starting to sympathize, but I'm not sure the Star Wars analogy is at fault directly. If I'm understanding your concern, it's that in clarifying the README based on previous feedback, examples like the following feel contrived: https://github.com/ga-wdi-boston/js-function-context-this#constructor-invocation-pattern

If that's your concern, I agree. But I didn't think there was anything wrong with the previous code example. Every single code example in this lesson was written to be delivered in a particular way, and I've done a spectacularly poor job of communicating those nuances.

raq929 commented 7 years ago

The problem with mostly with the constructor function. People couldn't conceive of needing more than one Deathstar. -insert movie rant here-

payne-chris-r commented 7 years ago

I think it's hard to show some of these without a contrived example. I think you're right that some of this is just mind bendy, I just wanted to do some introspection to see if I like them because they're star wars or because they're good examples.