Instructor Matt Talks about Week 1

On the first week of the JavaScript Bootcamp the students got their feet wet straight away by getting introduced to functions and decisions structures on their 2nd day of class. The decisions (if-else) and the loops (while, do-while, for) were a hard concept to grasp but the students powered through and did most of the challenges.

Mid-week was all about arrays and iterations. We covered such topics as the definition of an array, syntax, and the different methods of adding and subtracting from it. We also went over the different ways of accessing and/or editing the different elements of the array. The students were also introduced to the array API that included length, concatenation, looping, reverse, and sorting to just name a few. Although a harder concept, the students did find the subjects easier to understand.

In day 4 we worked through the JavaScript global and local scope (scope refers to where can an item can be seen in the program). The scope work lead to the next topic which was closures or accessing variables in an outer function from an inner one. The third subject of the day was objects. Objects with data, object with function/method and lastly creating new objects. The challenge of the day was: “The Car Challenge”. For this challenge, you must create a car with a make, model year, and color. You then add speed to the car, make it go faster or slower, and a couple more stories to see all the different behaviors you might have. By the end of the day, brains were starting to feel the heat and load of the program (pun intended).

Day 5 was all about promises. A promise is a way to ask the program to fetch some data, do other things meanwhile and when we get the fetch data do something with the it or if it failed take some other actions. We also talked about chaining (have multiple promises) and when and how to use them. At the end of the day we all gathered around and went over the personality test the students took to see how they all can work together.

By week end the students were happy to see how far they got, the general ambience of the class and how they all bonded through the struggles and success.