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1000 sats \ 1 reply \ @BlokchainB OP 17 Feb \ on: Learning to code: My MVP as inspired by PlebDev devs
Finished the introduction course on plebdev and I give a

Solid B

Here are my thoughts: @bitcoinplebdev
  1. Everything was done at rudimentary level. But the JavaScript course is really dense. The difficulty seem to go from elementary school to college calculus.
  2. The slides are a really big help. If you take this course keep the slides handy for quick reference. They will help you reinforce what Austin is teaching
  3. I am glad Austin lead off with git. It feels so exciting to push code from your IDE to your github. You really start to feel like a real programmer.
  4. Austin very accessible . As this course scales and more people take it access to Austin may not be so easy but having someone to instill confidence is a major plus. He was very helpful with a GitHub authentication issue I ran into to.
If the class makes these following improvements I think it can become a A level course:
  1. After each lesson offer a quiz to reinforce what we learn.
  2. Offer a small coding exercise to help people struggle through a problem. If people need help/tutor you can set a base fee for a set amount of time to help those work through the problem set.
  3. The jump to JavaScript is very intimidating. I took a JavaScript course (Wes Bos) back in 2018. I’m pretty sure I forgot 99.99% of it but I was able to recognize what Austin was doing. But if I was never exposed to JavaScript this video would of crushed my confidence. I know this a free course and beggars can’t be choosers but to really make this course entry level the JavaScript lecture could be broken up to make sure the major concepts are captured (like the DOM and event listeners) and coding a few buttons and listeners from a blank page like we did with CSS/HTML would of been really helpful.
  4. The course tracker isn’t working properly. I completed all the lessons yet the site is saying I only completed a few. This needs to be fixed. Seeing that green button of complete makes you feel good! Positive reinforcement !!
So my plan now is to review the slides review the JavaScript course again and then move on the next suggested course in the learning tree.
Thanks for putting together! Excited for what comes next
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534 sats \ 0 replies \ @bitcoinplebdev 18 Feb
Amazing thank you so much for the thorough feedback!
I agree with you in general about the JavaScript portion. This is a big jump and ideally I would like to do this in more baby steps (probably 3-4 individual lessons). I am planning on updating / improving the starter course soon (this was the first version and I actually filmed it in a single weekend lol) so a lot of little improvements I want to add!
I'm generally not a fan of quiz's (and it's a lot to build into the platform) but a few people have suggested it so far so I'll consider how it could be done easily.
Coding exercises are something that is a little more realistic and doable. There are repo "submissions" built into the platform so I could lean into this more (requiring submission for most lessons) but also embedding a codepen directly into a lesson is possible as well.
The lesson tracking can be a bit fickle still... In general it should trigger a lesson as completed after 80% of the video has been watched but this doesn't always trigger correctly. I think I will add a manual checkbox to allow you to mark it as completed if the auto lesson tracking doesn't work. I know progress is important and I want to make it encouraging and seamless on the platform! Still a ways to go.
Things will keep improving, thank you again for the support and feedback!
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