Week Nine

            So this is the ninth week of class, which means only six remain before classes are completed. This week was interesting that one of the classes was spent listening to a talk about mobile app creation from a company offering jobs and internships to students. Professor Downing allowing this event to take place, during an entire class no less, shows how much emphasis he puts on his students succeeding and not just in class. As I have mentioned before, he talked a lot about various opportunities throughout the semester for getting an internship, which is highly beneficial to succeeding later on, by getting experience and connections. So this is a prime example of how much he wishes to impress this idea, by using a class day for that purpose. This goes to show how much he cares about the success of his students both in class and outside of class, rather than some professor who only care about getting the material across and nothing else.

            The other big part of this week was the due date of the group project. The inclusion of a group project in and of itself can be beneficial since he has both pointed out verbally and in reading assignments about how in a company one would need to work in groups to get programs or software completed, thus it becomes a glimpse at the real world situation. Plus it does go against the stereotype that programmers all work alone in the dark eating nothing but pizza. In either case, I am finding that for this project having a group is really beneficial and having a group who will actually communicate and do their share of the work is even better. Obviously one cannot always know in advance who will be like that or not, but the professor has at times suggested studying in groups, which would give you a better idea of who was serious and who was not. And the pair project prior to this did the same with a single individual. It does beg the question if that is all part of his design when setting up the progression of projects to culminate into a group project.