So I just finished another week on the R JHU/Coursera courses that I’m working on. I was able to finish the quizzes and peer assignment for the Intro class. Due to past experience in the sciences and programming tools (e.g. git/github) this class was actually pretty easy for me. And thank goodness for that, because the other class was actually really hard this week.
The lectures are good – they are clear and easy to understand. Likewise the quizzes are nice and straightforward. What made the course hard was the homework assignment. Part of the difficulty was what you’d expect, i.e. that I’m new to R and so it takes a while to figure out how R does things. The other part of the difficulty was in figuring out what was needed to “pass” the assignment.
Actually, the issues that I (and someone else I know that is working through this) ran into remind me a lot of Code Academy. Both this assignment and Code Academy have people working through code assignments without a live person on the other end reviewing the code/output. The easiest way to compensate for that is to test the code that was being written by the students and see if the output from the test matches what is expected. (Of course this is how programmer’s test their actual code as well.)
A problem that I ran into with Code Academy is that they require the code they want the students to produce to almost exactly match their own – so rather than just testing output, they test the structure as well (i.e. looks for the presence of certain variables with certain names, etc.). While this makes sense in a way, it’s also a bit limiting as there’s always more than one way to achieve a goal.
This brings me back to the Coursera course. Like Code Academy, the code has to be reviewed. Also like Code Academy, this is done mainly through tests (although each class I’m taking does have *one* peer review assignment). Unlike Code Academy, the system doesn’t tell you what you’re missing.
For example, let’s say that you’re practicing on Code Academy and try to submit your work. If it fails, you might see a message like “uh oh, it looks like you don’t have a variable named $myvariable!”. This is helpful because it tells you what specifically failed so you can fix it. This isn’t built into the Submit program with the Coursera course – so when it fails, it fails with no other information. Frustrating :(
I did work through it and managed to get my assignment submitted with all parts passed. Although I originally planned to take the R classes in pairs, I think I’m going to take them one at a time for at least the next few so that I can get into a stride. So far, with these two classes anyway, I have the grades to earn the certificate with distinction. I’d like to keep it that way. (When I do things, I like to do them full speed ahead.)
In other news, the website for Nickel City Ruby (which I’m helping plan) is finally live! It looks great and I’m incredibly excited! Planning has been going pretty smoothly thus far, so here’s to hoping that trend continues until October :)
The Coding Mant.is 