Monday 3 October 2016

Group Assignments, bad learning.



So... taking this great course (INFO263) and we are going learn up to 5 different coding languages... Just a pity that we never really get taught them.

The assignment for this course is worth like 40%, (Woah!), and it's a group assignment (Groan).

I've always thought that group assignments would be great, Really - i did... past tense..
I thought that it was a bit conveyance of what (the uni calls) the real world is all about, after all it's not like we get stuck in the corner at work and told you have 2 hours to complete this task in silence.
No - we work in teams, in groups, in lots of things like that.

However - what the real world has and our "group projects" don't have is a manager.. a boss... el captaino... big honcho .. etc etc...
This makes the real world work better, as when your fellow group member maybe not putting as much effort into the assignment as they oughta be, then in the real world.. the boss gets angry.. then turns green and smashes up the place.
Oh - wait, thats' a different boss...

Anyways - that is my point of difference is, as grumpy as you can get with different members of your group - that's all it is. Grumpiness, they don't care, all of a sudden they get a passing mark for their assignment and they've done diddly squat .. in kiwi speak - that's nothing. literally.

So anyhow - back to the topic. 5 coding languages, HTML, CSS, PHP, MYSQL, Javascript. The lecturer seems to be in his own little world with this tho, because its an INFO course, Majority of students taking it are commerce. Meaning ... it's all about the money money money (admit it - you sang that in your head didn't you).

So when he's showing us javascript on the power point, and saying (and i quote).. "I don't know why you would need all this math stuff on a business website"... its because not everything in this world is related to commerce.. thats why.
There are other reasons why you can use php other than to build a bloody shopping cart.

Anyhow - learn't more in two days of Code Academy (seriously good) than in 5 weeks of lectures, and then to top it off - the exam was all about design or proposing a solution to a website... none of which was done in class.... gah - the horror... the shame..

Anyhow - gotta run to the next class.... later gators!