So Many Feels

Thanks for sharing your feelings about this class and a little more about yourselves! Look around: no matter what you wrote, someone else wrote something similar.

Excitement

“It’s a completely new field for me and way outside of my comfort zone.”
“I really like those “Aha” moments you get when you finally discover the answer to your issue or where your error/mistake was.”
“The thrill of finally getting the thing to work.”
“Gaining confidence to take on new projects at work/learn problem solving skills”
“I would like to learn how to think differently about problems.”
“I guess that it is a skill that if we don’t learn how to, then it might set us back in the future.”

Apprehension

“I’m afraid that I will fall behind and be unable to catch up.”
“Just that it will be difficult, but I am confident I can succeed with repetition and practice.”
“I’m terrible at remembering the details of syntax!”
“Haven’t always had great instructors”
“It just seems very dauting to start.”
“I have no apprehensions.”
“Worried about being overwhelmed with new concepts or when looking at lots of code”
“I’m worried about the time commitment”

Background

“I bought a book that I never read.”
“I’ve begun a few times in the past to try to teach myself coding, but every time I would get beyond the introductory stages and stop.”
“I’ve done web design in the past.”
“I’ve tinkered with CodeAcademy to work on learning Ruby but didn’t complete it.”
“I haven’t tried coding in python, but I am currently learning html and CSS.”
“A tiny bit of work with turtle and Python in High School.”
“Pretty much nothing?”
“I’ve taken an intro to python class, a java class, and another java intro class.”

Goals

“Learn the building blocks for programming and think like a coder. I want to acquire the tools that I need to learn other coding languages.”
“I would like to get to a level where I am comfortable with Python, and use skills in this class to improve my other coding abilities.”
“Feel confident with another language.”
“My main goal would be to not get lost in the thick of all of the code that we do and to be able to understand it well enough to troubleshoot on my own.”
“I want to put “knows python” on my resume and feel confident about it.”
“I want to learn about coding data visualizations and learn about useful code for digital archives.”
“I’m taking this class to have a solid foundation surrounding reading and writing code. I think this will help me be more effective in my current position.”
“To learn the mindset of a coder / programmer.”
“Survive!”

Thanks a ton for these great answers! No matter where you’re coming from, I’ll do everything I can to help you acheive your goals.

For those of you who are not very confident: remember, confidence is a state of mind! For those of you who are very confident: remember, confidence can make you blind to learning opportunities!

Let’s meet in the middle: Medium Confident (tm).

Today’s Class

Today we will:

Make your first post to our github blog
Go over some Github basics
(hopefully) start your second post to our Github blog. You’ll have the weekend to finish this for if you need it.

For next class you will:

Read about Variables
Make some basic Python Programs
Turn in your Python programs with a short reflective post (on Github) about the experience of coding and submitting them

Let’s get going!