Hack Reactor Remote Prep Week 2
Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4
Another week completed already! With the end of week 2 brings the close to the first half of the class. At the end of each class, the instructors give a survey to determine if you feel ‘behind pace,’ ‘on pace,’ or ‘ahead of pace.’ While I still feel I am in the ‘ahead of pace’ category, I have been learning quite a bit!
Introduction to JavaScript
One of the cool things about Hack Reactor is that, no matter the complexity of the material, they always find a way to challenge you with the exercises.
The first day of the week was very easy, covering terminal and operators in JavaScript. This gave me an opportunity to assist students newer to these concepts.
DOM Manipulation
We started learning about using JavaScript to manipulate the DOM. This was very interesting, as I have yet to really understand how to leverage JavaScript to manipulate the page.
Conditionals
This started with a brief refresher on the Boolean data type. We then spent most of our time working on If/Else statements. I really enjoyed taking what we had previously learned about DOM Manipulation and applying conditional statements based on user input.
While Loops
I was very impressed with Hack Reactor as they took a seemingly simple concept and really made students push the limits of while loops. As I would normally use for loops for a majority of my functional programming, it was interesting to see how you can really leverage while loops, such as creating a simple rock, paper, scissors game.
jQuery
While jQuery can take a little getting used to, it definitely seems like the way to go for DOM Manipulation. I really enjoyed learning about jQuery effects as well.
Hackathon
We had a Halfway Hackathon! As a team, we were required to develop a project idea, and using all that we have learned so far, develop that idea individually in 3 hours.
I really enjoyed working with my group to problem solve and create a really fun version of the classic ‘Breakout’ game.