This course is frustrating and poorly taught.

Perhaps Chris' comments are a bit harsh, but I agree in parts. I think the course could have benefited greatly from showing the actual design process. If it means watching three videos with an approach that later is discarded or refactored, so be it! We can learn from watching the mental process of a more experienced coder.

In fact, Guil Hernandez does something like that in his courses. A lot of times he codes something that will get overwritten later, or even deleted. And in each step, he explains how and why he came to that decision.

Here we start with the brainstorming approach (great), but then quickly transition into copying what the teacher decided the app was gonna be, and we don't really know why she made those design decisions. Why exactly those classes? Why that specific array structure? I'd love to watch how she came with that, and all the previous (wrong?) iterations of the final design.

I think when I'm paying for learning that has otherwise been effective it's important to voice my experience to try to get them to improve things.

I also think that, at least in part, that's exactly what the forums are intended for.

I think you guys might be missing my overall point, which is that while you may understand what is going on once it's explained in the video, the fact that it's taught this way means you're far less likely to retain it after the fact.

Rather than explaining the concepts behind each step, most of the steps just tell you what to do leaving your logical application of a code solution to not be used at all. The end result is understanding how it works after you have written it rather than applying the knowledge to determine what to write.

Aside from a poor teaching approach, there's a coding mistake in nearly every step.

This is not the quality of learning I've come to expect from Treehouse. It's so confusing and frustrating I've decided to just skip this entirely and worry about learning JS classes another way. OOJS is all over the place and this course is NOT a great way to learn it.

I've been applying it on my own in my job, but don't currently use classes. I was hoping this course would be useful for that. Instead, it's just trash full of mistakes and poor teaching.

I agree that its pretty confusing, but after struggling to write the code for challenges as much as i can and comparing it to her solution, i felt i'm learning a lot. i didn't fully answered correctly or used a different approach for challenges but since i did my best after watching the solution videos i understood whats going on and understood the approach of OOJS or at least her approach which anyone might do it differently and thats fine, but most important thing is bits and peaces that i picked up and eventually they turned to a bigger picture.

I have to say that I am really enjoying this course. In fact, it's exactly what I was hoping to find after taking the OOJS course. Ashley's teaching is perfect for the way I learn. Conceptualize -> Trial and Error -> See the solution -> learn from your mistakes. I made it all the way through to the part where you first build the board in the browser, and it did't work, so I started over, and the second time through so far has been an absolute breeze, remembering how to structure the code and walk myself through it. I love that I can understand it!

I'm a "new" student and the line: "I can only imagine what a totally new student to this course would be thinking at this point: "I'm just copying what she is doing and having almost no idea how exactly she got there"." is exactly how i'm feeling going through this course.

I love Treehouse and have learned alot on here, but at the moment i don't really understand the code, what it does and why i write it. As Chris said, i feel like i'm just copying the instructors code. I really wish we could slow down and go in depth with every part of the code (what, how and why). It would be nice to be treated as if were dumb and not just fly trough every topic expecting everything to stick the first time. Remember, the students who are here may only have learned the foundation of JS some months or even weeks ago and far from all of the material taught is sticking.

Keep up the good work Treehouse. I now you are capable of doing better :)

Has this course been changed since Chris's comments? I'm finding it quite enjoyable at this point

I also agree with Chris on this one. Maybe I'm just too tired to understand it since I've been all night trying to make it on my own and then get confused with her solution. I will probably skip this one. My question is, where can I find the new OOJS practice session that Ashley mentioned in the comments here? Does anyone know?

I agree with Chris here. I am completely new to programming and have been following in order the full stack javascript track from the very beginning.

I can barely follow this section of the course. It jumps too far ahead and doesn't explain why we are doing what we are doing.

Why not just make it simple and start by creating a single 'x' row which we can put tokens into. We can then build the game up from there. Why do everything at once? It gets very confusing. I would also be nice to have visual demonstrations of the game being developed. it's all very conceptual at this point which makes it REALLY hard to understand as I can't picture in my head what is going on.

I had to literally draw out on paper the connect 4 game with columns and rows just so i can visualise what the code she is talking about is doing.

I will be cancelling my subscription to treehouse and checking out Udemy courses after I finish this stack. That's how frustrated I am right now!

I am just as concerned for the lack of code testing so far in this project. So far I've been taught to test your code along the way, & I think this needs to be encouraged more throughout this project. I've had to run this Console.log commands just to see if the Spaces and the Tokens objects were created correctly.

Seeing the program output also helps students "sink in" what they just coded, even if they don't fully understand it yet.

I totally disagree. I am having a good time with this course. Then again, I have several years of OOP experience in Python. It is interesting to see another programmers design choices.

there might be infinite number of ways to go from point A to B but there is only one shortest path. Yes we do learn, but in such a circuitous and hard to follow "way" is amazing. This video gets a 1 star.

The teaching style is in this module is verbalized in the beginning as 'by example', which in the teaching world means 'follow along and use what you know from before'. It's even a question in the first quiz. This format of teaching is completely acceptable and typical to throw into a vast program such as the full-stack dev course at Treehouse. It's a tool to bridge the gap from the much smaller projects and everything you have been learning to start getting used to bigger projects and some more complicated ideas that are upcoming. Basically, it is training wheels on what it takes in terms of scope of a slightly more complex project than what has come before in the series.

As someone who comes from a completely non-tech/software background (former grade school teacher) I've found Treehouse to be the most helpful way to get my hands dirty in full-stack development. I've tried several other free and pay courses and have come back full circle to Treehouse as it is in general, more robust than the others. Some of the other options were definitely good, and each one has its own unique benefit, but overall I've found I was most responsive with Treehouse.

It is my opinion that Ashley and the team have done a great job putting this together. Thanks y'all!

Yeah, my head hurts at this one. Very dense in terms of the logic - not so much the technical/syntactical - just all the calls and references to other classes, far to complex for a first go at this area. Nothing in the supporting videos prepares you for this.

@treehouse has been great for my learning - as in learning the basics - but they need to put more indepth content into intermediate level topics, such as OOPJ - put some more 'heft' and details when explaining concepts and more practice modules at shorter intervals during teachings. But all-in-all @treehouse and the community has been amazing.