This is the other course that I took at Weber State. As the course title says, it was an introduction to programming. The language they used was Java. It began with the basics, and I remember that the first program we built was little more than the "Hello World" program that a lot of software developers may be familiar with, except that it printed out our name, favorite food, and favorite movie instead. Then it went into the basics that I spoke of in CS 1030, dealing with different types of variables like strings, integers, doubles, and booleans and figuring out how they work in calculation and output.
From there, it moved on to what were more difficult concepts for me to understand at the time. We moved into arrays and object oriented programming. I don't know what it is specifically about these concepts that was so difficult for me to learn, but I struggled with it quite a bit. And it seemed like every week I fell further and further behind in knowledge that other people in my class were gaining becuase I couldn't figure these few key concepts out. So while they were learning things like error handling, I was trying to figure out other classes, arrays, and keep up about error handling. It went this way ever since objects and arrays were introduced to the class.
There were a few key errors that I made in this class that made it so that I didn't pass it and I learned a lot from it. The first error I made is taking it as an online class. I didn't have any previous knowledge of what programming would be like, and should definitely taken it in person. More than that though, I didn't know how to ask for help or even the best way to search for answers the best way. Those should be pretty easy skills to gain, but I look back at that class and realize I didn't have it. I should have gone to my professor the second that I knew that the information was going way over my head and asked to sit down and work through it with him, instead of just going around in circles looking at the textbook and wondering what I was missing. I met with the professor once, on the final assignment of the class, and he was more than willing to sit down there and explain what I was not understanding, ironically neither of the key things that I had struggled with all semester. Being able to accept that I wasn't understanding things and asking for help is something that should be so easy to do and it is something that I have learned is crucial in my learning. But also utilizing things like Stach Overflow and websites like that have been huge in my learning since this course. To be able to see that someone has had trouble similar to what I may be having and see multiple different types of solutions has helped me to learn a lot since then.