What did you learn today?

A popular teaching and engagement strategy is call and response. When teacher’s use that strategy, they often ask students a question or have students say back a phrase to demonstrate understanding. In the the world of computers, “call and response” is request and response. The client is the teacher, and the student is the server. The client attempts to grab information from the the server in the form of requests. These requests can have different types (such as GET, POST, DELETE, PUT, and OPTIONS) and the server sends a “response” with information that the client can use (usually by displaying new or updated information to the user in the browser). I feel like I understand this model, but I don’t feel like I understood enough of how to code requests and responses.

To tackle the sprint over the last two days, we were directed to the node.js documentation. The documentation was overwhelming, and I wasn’t sure which code snippets I needed to set up the chatterbox server. I understood how to collect or prepare data base on an incoming request for data. At any rate, the sprint was largely unproductive, which I felt was more of a lack of instruction and lack of information rather than a lack of effort from myself or my pair.

Did you learn anything new about yourself?

I have high expectations for quality instruction, and I feel confused, frustrated, or even degraded when I think that instruction does not prepare students for a task or challenge. The reason I feel this way is because the task or challenge is outside of my zone of proximal development since I don’t currently have the skills or knowledge to accomplish the task. Even with assistance, I may not be able to accomplish the task.

In order to combat those feelings, I read through documentation and tried to work through the confusion with my pair. Everything eventually became clear after watching the solution video for the task. My pair and I were pretty self-reliant through the confusion, and we didn’t send in any Help Requests. I’m wondering what else we could have done differently to wrap our heads around the problem. If anything, I think the instruction or the task could have been altered or improved.

Zone of Proximal Development

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_development

Anything you want to do differently tomorrow?

I worked on my blog last night and managed to set up pages with sections for HackReactor, JavaScript, and About Me. I want to write a article on D3.js to kick off my technical writing. I’m giving myself a due date of Sunday rather than tomorrow since the blog took more time to set up than I initially anticipated.

I want to go to bed early again tomorrow. Sleep never felt so good.