Regarding practical exercises

[Tomas]

In some of the topics, Zac tells something like: “now I suggest to play with that on your own”.

To me it is hard to come up with some meaningful tasks on my own when I just starting to learn the programming language. Currently, I use https://www.codecademy.com JavaScript course to have some kind of practical tasks and of course, those are not aligned with JS4WP topics.

So my suggestion would be to create practical tasks related to main topics, as that would really benefit knowledge retention.

Thank you!

[Tomas]

Another idea: perhaps users could also suggest their ideas, practical exercises riddles, etc. and Zac could include them later to the course?

[Zac Gordon]

Hey Tomas!

Thanks for bringing up this discussion. It is something I have heard before from students who are newer to programming JavaScript and want to practice but could use a little more guidance with what projects to tackle next.

I agree and it was a conscious decision to not include these at this time. This was mostly because this course is so big that I really need to get through the content. In addition to creating the exercises in the videos and the projects we build it would have taken me quite longer since coming up with creative and good extra examples is tricky (as you’re pointing out).

Once we get into Part 2 and 3 of the course this will be less of an issue and I will see if maybe we can compile some things other students have done, but I do not usually expect much. Just take what we learned, tweak it and see if you can do the same thing again, but a little different. It is really the route practice that is important not really you extrapolating creative, complex ideas.

But all that said, I hear you.

Once you build through VanillaPress V1 and then go back and look at some of the videos again you will have a lot more ideas and a lot more will come to you, so don’t worry about it too much, and I’ll do what I can at some point to try to help remedy the problem you bring up here.

[Tomas]

Thank you!

Perhaps every topic could have just a link to JSBin, where you or community could post practical tasks.

Eg. in Code Academy, I like that once you learn something, next screen is empty and just says: Do this or do that. So you have to remember the statement. Sometimes it gives just several pieces, that you have to use to completed whole intended code sample.

So I hope that in the future you will be able to add that component 😉

[Tomas]

Another idea. Practical exercises could be submitted and rated as User Contributed Notes in php manual:

https://secure.php.net/manual/en/language.variables.variable.php

[Zac Gordon]

Tomas you are right on point, I am actually going to talk about this in my End of the Year Student Announcement coming this week. Plug this thread particularly 🙂

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