framing_wdi_hw.md

Framing Your WDI Experience

You're all adults with 20+ years of experience as learners, and you know your learning patterns best. Your first homework assignment is to examine the entirety of your learning history to identify your perceived strengths and weaknesses as a student, so you can make the most of your experience in WDI.

Objectives

• gain self-awareness as a student
• get comfortable working in the command line
• get practical experience using git for version control
• gain muscle memory for making frequent, descriptive, present-tense commit messages as you progress
• get your first taste of diving into unfamiliar documentation for new languages and tools (in this case, Markdown and Mou)

Directions

1. If you haven't, download and install Mou.

2. Using the command line, create a directory on your desktop called markdown_assignments. Enter the directory and initialize it as a git repository.

3. Within markdown_assignments, create a file called learning_history_review.md. This file will be written in a language called Markdown. Markdown is a simple markup language used throughout the open source community, as it allows for simple code formatting within regular text documents, and we'll be using a lot of it throughout the course.

4. Create a header that reads "Reviewing My Learning History". Then answer the questions below, keeping your entire learning history in mind and making frequent commits as you progress.

NOTE: Make the question text bold for ease of distinction.

Questions

• What habits have you developed over the years that you feel might hinder you as a learner during WDI?

• How can you combat or minimize those habits' effects on your experience at General Assembly?

• What learning tactics or approaches do you feel have most benefitted you as a student?

• Can you think of any strategies to increase the output or viability of these approaches in the context of WDI? (No idea is too crazy.)

• What is your greatest fear as a WDI student?

• Is this fear valid? If so, does it serve you as someone learning to program?