Makers Day 9

Today was a real mixed bag.

I started the day having a crack at the practicals provided to us for week 1 — last week’s exercises. Thinking they would be a walk in the park, I was quickly sat firmly down and told otherwise. I was stumped within seconds. I spent the entire morning struggling. Even with help from my peers, I ended up deleting the whole thing and deciding to have another go on another day.

Key learning point: asking for help doesn’t have to be a last resort. It took me two hours of soul-destroying effort before I finally asked for help. In the future, if I haven’t achieved anything within half an hour, I will reach out.

Conversely, the afternoon was fantastic. Charlie DM and I paired on the Oyster card challenge. We had both reached the same step, but weren’t totally sure on the work we had just completed. By starting our afternoon a couple of steps back together, we slowly worked our way through and by the end we were on a real coding high!

A key learning point from me was how classes can share information. Let’s say a class method sets up a variable with certain data e.g. name & zone. Another class can call a new instance of this first class. This new instance will then respond to the methods made for it in its own class script. Therefore by calling a new instance of the first class, and calling an appropriate method on it, the new class can access the data stored in the first class.

That’s a mouthful, but reading it slowing will both make sense and highlight spelling mistakes.