Question and review workshop

Getting setup 💻

Please follow the steps below:

1. The whole group should split up into separate breakout rooms. Then each breakout room / table should split up into pairs.

2. In your pairs, label yourselves person 1 and person 2 - it doesn’t matter who is 1 or 2, you’ll end up swapping. 😄

3. You will end up swapping roles frequently during this activity. To begin with, Person 1 fork this repository and clone it to your local machine.

4. Person 2 should clone Person 1’s fork to their local machine.

5. Once it is cloned, in Github desktop, Person 1 should go to Branch at the top of the window and click New branch… and then enter a name: js-2-week-1-questions. Don’t worry if you don’t understand what branches are - they’ll explained in depth later on in the course.

Answering questions ❓

In this next section, you’ll need to answer some questions ❓

N.B: You may struggle to answer some or all of the questions in this section: however, we’re not trying to trick you or catch you out! It’s important you try answering in your own terms in this section! You’ll really feel the benefit from trying to answer questions that may appear tricky at first.

So for the first question, Person 1 and Person 2 can read the first question.

• Person 2 try and answer the question out loud in your own words.
• Person 1 should write down Person 1’s answer in the file and then commit and push your changes.

Then swap over ( so Person 1 now becomes Person 2 and vice versa ) and try the next question.

❗🕥 Don’t spend longer than 3 minutes on each question

You’ll find the first question in js-1-week-2/0.md

Whole group discussion

After you’ve answered questions. The whole group should go through the questions and a volunteer can invite responses from the different pairs. This is a good opportunity to correct, clarify and consolidate our answers collectively.

Review time

After the group discussion, every pair should raise a PR from Person 1’s forked repo to the origin repo. Then ask for feedback by requesting a review of the PR from the pair that is sat to the right of you. Each pair should then review the PR they’ve been requested to review.

Debugging is Asking Questions

Prep

• Re-read this article about Mental Models
• Watch this video about VSCode Debugger and follow along with the mini-workshop
• Open this CYF Workshops repo in VSCode and go to the debugging/bank folder to find the problem bank.

Whew, that’s loads! But we did set it all as coursework, so you have done it already, right? 😉

Today we’re going to use our formal language of developer questions. We began with this basic format:

1. What I did
2. What I expected
3. What actually happened

This format helps to find the discrepancies between expectations and reality. (This is the gap in our understanding.)

It really helps us with debugging. Today we will use a debugger and our scientific method to find and fix bugs. Recall your scientific method:

Setup

Get into pairs. Each pair consists of two roles:

1. Computer: Execute the code mentally, predicting the outcome.
2. Debugger: Use the VSCode debugger to step through the code.

You will swap roles after each exercise.

Set a whole class timer for 10 minutes.

Stepping

const sumArray = (numbers) => {
  let total = 0;
  for (let i = 0; i < numbers.length; i++) {
    total += numbers[i];
  }
  return total;
};
console.log(sumArray([1, 2, 3]));

Debugging

Okay, swap roles. Set a whole class timer for 15 minutes.

const findLargest = (numbers) => {
  let largest = numbers[0];
  for (let i = 1; i < numbers.length; i++) {
    if (numbers[i] > largest) {
      largest = numbers[i];
    }
  }
  return largest;
};
console.log(findLargest([3, 7, 2, 5, 6]));

Okay, swap roles. If you have time left and you’re into this, there are many problems stored in debugging/bank. Set a whole class timer for 15 minutes.

JS1 Exercises to do in study group

See dir