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Python

Posted by Y B
Y B
14,136 Points

Finished my first track - some feedback and questions

I've just finished my first track at treehouse and there were some things I liked and some not so much (which could be because I don't understand how things work)

Key things I liked:

  • Gamified progress - simple but very effective, this pushed me on a lot.
  • Amazingly responsive community and course teacher - great quick feedback to questions - for me this is the key differentiator for treehouse
  • Use of tracks, linking mini courses from the library together - definitely key to help build up a knowledge base and to know what to tackle next.
  • Clear, well presented and professional videos - this counts for a lot compared to more amateur courses out there
  • built in workspace (however a few questions on this below)

Questions or things that weren't so good:

  • Lack of example answers to challenges - I don't think I missed these somewhere and the impression I got was this was possibly intentional, which if this is the case from a certain angle I can appreciate why - try to get students to do it themselves so they learn better. However for me this puts a much bigger burden on the question and answer system and being used to an internet that doesn't appreciate 'newb' questions it feels strange, however people are responsive.
    Still even with this it can prevent progression - the tracks are locked and if a challenge isn't completed a student can't move on until the next section until they're question is answered - which can take a day or so. Also with this approach this misses the chance to learn from other students and what their approach was - which may be better (or just different) - I've found this incredibly important on other courses.

  • Workspaces - a great idea although they didn't work well for me.

It would have been great for each video to interact and pull apart the code for that video - however for me on the python course workspaces were always empty apart from one time in the later part of the datetime course. I would have been so much more productive if the code was there each time.

Saving of workspaces and answers to challenges. I'm not sure if this is a feature of workspaces or not. They seem to save if I didn't close the workspace, if I did they never came back. Challenges definitely never saved. For me both of these are really important - it's key to look back on the answers I give to challenges or the pieces of work I do in workspaces and I wanted to do this all the time throughout the course, but couldn't. In hindsight I could have saved it all offline but ideally it should be built into the site (it also helps your subscription model).

  • Ambiguous course questions & challenges- wow incredibly ambiguous at times - this cost me a lot of time. Still tutor responds and amended the course quickly so this should get better over time (bear in mind with the course being online there will be a big mix of abilities and cultures on here).

Would be good to hear your thoughts, thanks.

2 Answers

Kenneth Love
STAFF
Kenneth Love
Treehouse Guest Teacher
Kenneth Love
Kenneth Love
Treehouse Guest Teacher

Thanks for the feedback! I'll make sure more people on our team see this. A few things I want to respond to:

  • Since you only did the Python track, all of the code challenges were done by me. Yes, some are not directly referenced/answered in the course videos. This is 100% by design. I know it can be frustrating at times (more on this in a bit), but I want you to get and use the concept way more than I want you to copy code from one of the videos and put it into a challenge.
  • Regarding the frustration bit. Sorry! :S I try to make the challenges and quizzes as accessible as possible but, as often happens, I can't account for everyone's individual reading of a prompt or question. As you've seen, I'm always happy to read and use suggestions or making them more accessible and less frustrating.
  • I think you're, perhaps, getting code challenges and Workspaces confused. Workspaces are what we're using when you're watching a video. They're launched from the little code window icon in the lefthand sidebar. They're "saved" every time you save a file, just like your text editor on your computer. The code challenges, though, the things you do between videos, aren't saved anywhere. They're evaluated when you submit them and you either pass or you don't. Sadly, there's not a mechanism for handling when a student is obviously stuck on one and providing some further guidance. Yet.

I'm glad we have such an active Forum. I feel like that acts as a decent stopgap for people that are hopelessly lost on a code challenge.

Again, thanks for your perspective on this!

Y B
Y B
14,136 Points
Y B
Y B
14,136 Points

Kenneth thanks for your reply, very good to have your comments.

  1. Thanks I agree with the approach of not giving students everything on a plate, but it's good to have a balance between getting students to a point where they can figure it for them selves and not having enough info so it becomes a hunt on the web exercise. For me it was a bit too much of the later and the course felt a bit out of order/jumbled up at times.

  2. No, I understand how these are separate. (Out of interest do workspaces keep your work after finishing the session? I couldn't get that functionality to work, I could save and run a file. but come back the next day and pick up a course again and it was gone). Challenges don't save, for the beginner this is definitely frustrating. I had to start again several times when I couldn't complete a challenge in one go - hey I'm a beginner so this happened quite a bit. Also on udacity and codecademy to pick a couple of examples these save your work in challenges and keep it. This is incredibly useful - if I log onto one of those other sites now, I can look back and see how I completed a challenge and help reinforce what I learnt and compare it to other solutions that I've found since then. (It would be useful to have a 'launch workspace' button on the challenge page too. Not all videos require a workspace to be launched so it's good to have a workspace to use when trying a challenge). The challenges output seems to suppress some error output. This made a huge difference for me when I realised it did this, as often I had nothing more than try again to work with. (I have saved a few example screenshots of where this occurs if that's useful?)

Things I loved specifically about the python course were:

  1. Much greater focus on OOP than other courses. Other beginner courses don't cover this nearly as well as you did here and definitely don't use it anywhere near as much.
  2. Loved being shown how to use the console more, pdb, logging, pip all practical and incredibly useful things.
  3. enumerate - great few examples using this
  4. really good section on tuples

For me the lack of being able to see/discuss different approaches to problems/challenges and the lack of preservation of work already done (workspaces & challenges) are near deal-breakers for me. That the questions were a bit too ambiguous (great that you are dealing with that) and the restricted output in challenges did massively add to the frustration of the course.

However there is plenty to like and the reason for me giving detailed feedback is with a few small tweaks I think it could be an amazing experience. I hope you appreciate the feedback and find it useful.

Anyway I'm off to do the reg expressions course...