Course Review – OOP

We are finally here, the last two weeks of the semester. It has been fun, difficult and with many decisions. One of them was taking the OOP course with Ken.

I see a lot of potencial in this course, Ken implemented this «Choose your own grade» mechanic, in which we (based on what we learned and what we did) choose what you deserve as a grade.

This is an interesing idea, yet, it happens that a lot of students lie about their grades, or choose to never attend the class since you cannot fail by absences, bad idea, we do talked about OOP concepts in class, not always as a lecture, but as a blog post in which we had to investigate by ourselves or by making a team and then begin to gather information from different sources. This information was later evaluated as an exam, Ken also (based on a rubric) asked what we deserved as a grade.

Not every assignment on the course was about practical Java code, there was also theoric stuff we had to learn by watching videos on Lynda.com and a project which had to involve us learning some object-oriented programming. In our case we chose to learn about Unity.

The course Ken is teaching is not about learning Java, it’s about learning OBJECTS, also we were taught that we have to be in control of our own learning, investigating concepts by ourselves, how the social interaction can be useful and that we have to document our own progress and experiences in a blog, so then we can share it once we become sucessful.

I liked the course, despite what other students might say. I see potential in this way of teaching/learning but it needs to fix some things, i really liked how we had to work as a team to learn this concepts, we did this only in 2 classes if i can recall. Would have liked a couple more of lectures, even if the other students don’t pay enought attenttion. Would have liked more guidance in doing the practical WSQ’s (kinda my fault by not asking Ken). The Lynda videos were great, the flexibility of the course was great, the BEEP-BEEP in the classroom was annoying, but overall it was a good course.