7/6/09 UPDATE: Coleman College is now known as Coleman University - this review was written for their classes that I took in 2005-2006, so some things in their curriculum may have changed since then.
Here we go with part 6 of my sort of review, but not really much of a review.
The classes I had for mod 6 were C++ and UML. It is so disappointing when there are things you really want to learn, but when you finally have the classes, you don't learn that much from them. That's how I felt about C++. I really wanted to learn the ins and outs of C++, but I learned barely anything new (since most of the concepts were similar to Java), yet I still got a 100 since it was so easy. The MFC applications we made were interesting, but again not really much of a "real world" type of application. Well, at least it wasn't more yo-yos and fireworks.
My class was also grouped together with students who were in mod 4 & 5, so our class was huge. And it kind of hindered our progress when not everybody understood the material as well because, for the people who were only in mod 4, it was their first object oriented programming class. I found myself being asked for help a lot in this class by other students (a lot more than in previous mods). People knew that I knew what I was doing and could help them out. So I did get a bit of debugging experience with trying to find the problems in other people's codes.
Okay, so the afternoon class... I don't know the official name of the class, but we learned UML. Zzzzzz. Barely anybody could stay awake for this class. It was just nothing that any of us were interested in. We all would just rather be writing programs than diagraming them.
I understand the importance of modeling a system before you go ahead and get to work on it. The beginning phases of a project are the most important part of the systems development life cycle. Because if you don't spot your errors early on, it costs more and more the later you get in the development cycle to fix them. Stuff like UML helps you to see how your system will work, and if the systems analysis phase missed any sort of requirements. But UML is just so boring when you'd rather be coding. But this class is helpful in helping you understand how to read UML diagrams.
So, this mod was just... meh. I really wished I could have learned a lot more C++ instead of spending most of my time looking through other people's code to fix it. And UML... eh, maybe that should be combined with part of the capstone or should be left as an elective. I'll get into the capstone in part 7.
Here are the links to all of the parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, more thoughts
Here we go with part 6 of my sort of review, but not really much of a review.
The classes I had for mod 6 were C++ and UML. It is so disappointing when there are things you really want to learn, but when you finally have the classes, you don't learn that much from them. That's how I felt about C++. I really wanted to learn the ins and outs of C++, but I learned barely anything new (since most of the concepts were similar to Java), yet I still got a 100 since it was so easy. The MFC applications we made were interesting, but again not really much of a "real world" type of application. Well, at least it wasn't more yo-yos and fireworks.
My class was also grouped together with students who were in mod 4 & 5, so our class was huge. And it kind of hindered our progress when not everybody understood the material as well because, for the people who were only in mod 4, it was their first object oriented programming class. I found myself being asked for help a lot in this class by other students (a lot more than in previous mods). People knew that I knew what I was doing and could help them out. So I did get a bit of debugging experience with trying to find the problems in other people's codes.
Okay, so the afternoon class... I don't know the official name of the class, but we learned UML. Zzzzzz. Barely anybody could stay awake for this class. It was just nothing that any of us were interested in. We all would just rather be writing programs than diagraming them.
I understand the importance of modeling a system before you go ahead and get to work on it. The beginning phases of a project are the most important part of the systems development life cycle. Because if you don't spot your errors early on, it costs more and more the later you get in the development cycle to fix them. Stuff like UML helps you to see how your system will work, and if the systems analysis phase missed any sort of requirements. But UML is just so boring when you'd rather be coding. But this class is helpful in helping you understand how to read UML diagrams.
So, this mod was just... meh. I really wished I could have learned a lot more C++ instead of spending most of my time looking through other people's code to fix it. And UML... eh, maybe that should be combined with part of the capstone or should be left as an elective. I'll get into the capstone in part 7.
Here are the links to all of the parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, more thoughts
