User Story
As a student I can sign up for FAC-TRACK

Acceptance Criteria

Sign up page

• When I'm on "Sign up" page, I want to be able to sign up to FAC TRACK
• When on "sign up" page, I want a form to fill in my details. (Username, Email, Password, Confirm Password)

Error Handling:
- [ ] Error when I fill in something wrong.
- [ ] Email / user already exists warning.

Redirect after signup
- [ ] When I finish signing up and all the fields match I want to be re-directed to the login.
- [ ] If I sign up with incorrect information I want to get an error message/page.

functionality

• Once successful, user is stored in database in Users table.
• Error handling for email, name in backend
• Front end form validation (stretch)

Look at error handling workshop before embarking upon this. Seriously.###

It is good, and makes sense.
At least check out the solutions files, you won't get rick rolled again Jason!

• Create a frontend form to send data
• Create a fetch request to send and receive data to and from the backend
• Incoming data gets posted to database, completed and confidence level into the feedback table
• test post requests in pgcli / psqls with jest example I worked on using tape
  • check if test database is built correctly with console logs
  • run the post query after build

User Story
As a student I can choose to create an account or sign in.

Acceptance Criteria

• When I'm on FAC-TRAC I want to get an option to log-in or be able to navigate to a sign up page.
• Once signed up I want to be sent to a log-in page.
• Once logged in I want to be sent straight to dashboard where I can see a header with a logo and a footer with navigation.

User Story:
As a student I can easily see my tasks completed and aggregate confidence level for different weeks via an indicator on the dashboard.

Acceptance Criteria:

dashboard

• I can easily see all subjects / weeks

tasks

• I can see my progress shown as a fraction.
• I can see me progress shown visually as pie chart thing.

confidence

• I can see my aggregate confidence for a week displayed as a coloured bar on the dashboard.
• The bar will always be the same length.
• The aggregation will be an average of the tasks for the week which have a confidence indicator filled in.

About the Interviewee

• name, age (or age range)
  • Harry
  • 26
• what FAC cohort were you?
  • 3
• What did you do before and after the course?
  • University, then a sales position in a start up
  • Tried to be a freelance developer to make websites, which didn't go well. Decided being a Full Stack developer would be better
  • After FAC, worked in FAC co-operative, which was not successful.
  • Now working in a Start-up as a developer. Has been a designer for about 3 years.
• Do you know what type of learner you are?
  • Don't really know, but I'd say verbal. Need to parrott back at people- reformulating in owns words.
• What was your last learning experience before the course?
  • University, self-taught web design, school was shit. TreeHouse - it was good. FAC was revolutionary

Learning Experience on the Course

• What did you find most helpful for your learning on the course?

  • working on a hard problem, lets take a break go on a walk and talk about it.
  • getting away from the front of a screen.

• What did you find least helpful for your learning on the course?

  • We did a terminal based exercise program (node) print question print code back in terminal.
  • No hints on how to get it right.
  • Being taught by a computer = frustrating.
  • Kata code Wars - have a go to see if requirement

• Was there something that could have enhanced your learning experience?

  • I wish I had more exposure to real life developers/graduates. Encouragement, tell us its OK.

Organising and navigating online learning materials

• How do you organise and navigate your general online learning resources?

  • I'll try to write a lot about things I have a master document and link to relevant articles.
  • I use an app called Bear. This lets you to mark up keywords within the text, and keywords are searchable.

• What online learning platforms have you used? If so what progress indicators did you like?

  • I really like it when it makes a fuss over me - something like TinyCards.
  • Simple but pleasing. Badges, trophies, some sort of reward.
  • I am easily turned off of something, if it goes on forever (step 1 of 1000).

• Can you list any pros and cons of course materials being organised on Github?

  • pros: it is monitored and moderated - good to know there is a review process.
  • cons: it can be a bit dull. A column of text essentially. The process can also be longwinded to get something changed - getting approval from others people to merge etc.

Monitoring / Tracking of your progress on the Course

• Do you track your progress through FAC workshops at present? If not, why not?

  • No, No else was doing it and I didn't have the impetus to do it.

• Do you think it would have been helpful to monitor progress? If so, what would you have liked to monitor?

  • Yes. That is a hard one for me what is important? what is a good scale?
  • Uses Crello which is like KanBan when I get a new project or idea.
  • I use it because it visual and like a whiteboard.

• Was there any reason that you did not complete all of the workshops / challenges on the curriculum?

  • (Answered Below)

Use of, and features of a potential MVP

• What do you believe an app to track your progress would help you to achieve?

  • Help me develop good habits. I get the urge to do something and go for it, then not do it for ages.

• If you could track your progress, what type of metrics would be useful to you?

  • something pretty. charts. data vis

• How much time would you ideally invest in tracking your progress?

  • as little as possible, 5mins.

• If a progress tracker app would be useful to you, would you want it to work with other resources (e.g. non FAC, non Github.)

  • Maybe, if it vis than that IFTTT - connecting services together.
  • If I get cash out put five pounds in a saving post.
  • it would be cool. I could check off a list and the progress bar was done else where.

• Would it be useful to see your peers progress with workshops?

  • Yes. worst case scenario I am the worst and I feel bad.
  • If it was spun so that a person would be able to help you improve.

Other comments:
- When i was doing the course I was able to avoid. I always do the CSS. when I finished I felt I
hadn't learnt a lot of javascript.

About the Interviewee ( 3 mins) 👩 👨
• name, age (or age range)
Sandra - 28
• what FAC cohort were you?

FAC 15
• What did you do before and after the course?

• Do you know what type of learner you are?
o visual
o kinaesthetic
o aural
o verbal
o If not, what type of learner do you think you are?
Read and look – visual. Can have problems hearing what people say sometimes
• What was your last learning experience before the course?
I get into this obsession, my last organised exp was at uni
Learning Experience & course curriculum on GitHub 🎓 (7 mins)
• How did you find accessing the course curriculum on GitHub and what did you find most and least helpful in the information to enhance your learning?
Probably cos am visual and prefer to read by myself, its good that the material was better to find on GitHub. There are gaps in the course material, example when I missed a day code along and she did it from home, but sometimes there is no solution folder, there was one that I made work but was not the correct solution but could not find the original material. Sometimes its a little bit lacking
• How often have you revisited the curriculum during and after the course?
Sometimes, if we are looking for something in particular, look for the workship what we did and how we did it, so quite often.

• Can you list any pros and cons of course materials

Organising and navigating online learning materials 📂 (6 mins)
• How do you organise and navigate your general online learning resources?
I probs I haven’t used that much during the course but before the course, I did, mostly through coding websites. You don’t learn to form youtube code along, I usually bookmark everything useful but then forget about it
• What online learning platforms have you used? If so what progress indicators did you like?
I used udacity before, I remember it was useful cos my pc broke and lost everything then it restarted and when I went on the site it had a record what was done so I didn’t lose my progress, I liked that track me closely, there was a checklist to display,. I like FCC to navigate and how kind of the old fashion way so was familiar to me, you know what to do. You don’t get that from the GitHub course experience.
Monitoring / Tracking of your progress on the Course 📊 (7 mins)
• How do you track your progress through FAC workshops at present? If not, why not?
I have not tracked, why? I haven't had time to do it. I tried to revise a bit on Xmas break and I felt like trying to do a bit of everything we been through but didn’t do it throughout the course book, I recommend if they had a folder with all the workshops. It would be easier to be in one place. There is an issue folder but the workshops are not in there.
• Do you think it would have been helpful to monitor progress? If so, what would you have liked to monitor?
Yes, cos before I was revising before Xmas and id didn't know what I needed to do and was just done through memory. For example, I had not memory API request method knowledge, so there were deffo gaps but I didn’t know about them

• Was there any reason that you did not complete all of the workshops/challenges on the curriculum?

• Would an app that allows you to track your progress throughout the course provide value to you?
Yes I think so, cos I would of know what I was missing from the start and getting those gaps

Use of, and features of a potential MVP 📋 (5 mins)
• What do you believe an app to track your progress would help you to achieve?

• If you could track your progress, what type of metrics would be useful to you?
That is a good question I would like to track if I had completed it or not. Most important part if I felt comfortable doing that, callback water it would of be good to mark as this was something to go back go. Something to tell me if I found it hard or not.
How many steps I've gotten through, how many of the steps ive done. 3 out of 5

• How much time would you ideally invest in tracking your progress?
I would like to be reminded off and give me reminders, to do this and that workshops. I would like to use. It if has folders to point me in the right direction so its easy to find things. I think it would be helpful is it was simple, it was just the workshops so I can track that. Simplified better.
• If a progress tracker app would be useful to you, would you want it to work with other resources (e.g. non FAC, non Github.)
I don’t think it would need to, but it may be good to have an option for the installation list so people know about it from the start.

• Would it be useful to see your peers progress with workshops?
This could be useful but I don’t feel strongly for either of. Possibly

• get request from the database of completion of users week
• display this overall figure on the dashboard

As Jest seems to discover and run all test files regardless of their location, I propose the following:
move test files to reside in the folder for the files they are testing

• database.test.js => db folder
• routes.test.js=> routes folder
  ...etc

Interview Questions ❓

About the Interviewee ( 3 mins) 👩 👨

Name: Matt Hall 

Age (or age range): 28

What FAC cohort were you?  FACN4 Nazareth/ Joined FAC14 at the end 
Exactly the same curriculum, did react before student projects. 

What did you do before and after the course?

When I was 15, I started doing freelance html and css, then at 17 I started up a website business, and at 18 I went to university. After uni I went to a digital agency called ‘razor fish’, where I did digital/design strategy. Then I went traveling for four months to south america and started up a digital agency doing advertising and traveled around the world. Then I did FAC in July. Took Freelance Clients whilst doing FAC then after went to taiwan Philippines and Hong Kong.

Do you know what type of learner you are? (Visual, Kinaesthetic, Oral, Verbal)

I am a practical learner. I am strongest when applying knowledge which is why I love FAC. As you guys know you do a lot of theory and then at the end you do a project.

Learning Experience & course curriculum on GitHub 🎓 (7 mins)

How did you find accessing the course curriculum on GitHub and what did you find most and least helpful in the information to enhance your learning?

I felt like it was a good way to learn because of how central github is to programming. At first I was a bit like what the hell is this but it is a useful skill. It also makes the curriculum open source to have it on github.

Least helpful thing was how dispersed the course information is. There is no cohesive overview of everything in the course. React and design week fit a bit outside of the normal curricum.

How often have you revisited the curriculum during and after the course?

During the course, everyday, in terms of afterwards probably 2-3 times a week. To give context, when you do FAC in London its intense, but when you do it in nazareth its your life. During the week we were really focused solely on the course. Also what is slightly different from the London course, the Naz course has more international and Arab students - this causes a large gap between the best and the worst users as they often have not done as much coding as the british students. This meant that sometimes you could not complete the whole course during the day as you had to help other students with their problems so sometimes in the evening we would continue working.

Organising and navigating online learning materials 📂 (6 mins)

How do you organise and navigate your general online learning resources?

I am bad at organisation so I do a lot off the whim. Realistically it was a combination of through memory and also through using Evernote. So keeping notes of different things that A) i had missed or B) I hadn’t understood.

What online learning platforms have you used? If so what progress indicators did 		you like?

I have used Free code camp, Codewars, Code Academy, Edex, Coursera. In my mind they split up into two different groups. Coursera and Edex I liked because there were progress indicators and you had an experience and user journey. Because these courses were quite long that was quite important. It was also nice that the app synced with the internet. I also felt that the quality of the material was quite high with universities names associated.

In terms of FCC and Codewars. I liked that you could programme within the experience, so its more practical. I also liked the gamification and also instant gratification, you know instantly if you’re doing stuff right and they give you good hints.

Monitoring / Tracking of your progress on the Course 📊 (7 mins)

How do you track your progress through FAC workshops at present? If not, why 		not?

I think i didn’t track my progress other than what I said earlier. Why did i not ? A) because there was so much to do that it was hard to see the bigger picture B) I didn’t feel far behind so I didn’t feel like i needed to as I was doing so much on a day to day basis. There’s also no real good way of doing that either. 

Do you think it would have been helpful to monitor progress? If so, what would you 	have liked to monitor?

For me not necessarily, it wouldn't have changed my FAC experience. That may be because I could keep up, also I had plenty of spare time. I know that if i lived in London it may not have been like this because London takes over. But generally speaking from what I have observed and for some of the students who struggled more It would definitely be useful. With tracking in general: something that shows when have i done this and I have not done this would be useful. A way to note how you found a subject area would also be nice. Traffic lights would be great - it could give you the overview of ‘im really good at this but maybe I should work on that’. Big picture (stretch goal), allowing the course facilitator/ mentors to see how people are feeling about the course would be great. If they could access this information they could use spare FAC time more efficiently. Would also be cool if it suggested additional resources or included additional ramification. notification to say “don't forget about this workshop you didn’t complete”.

Was there any reason that you did not complete all of the workshops/challenges on 	the curriculum?

Yes completed most of them more or less.

Use of, and features of a potential MVP 📋 (5 mins)

What do you believe an app to track your progress would help you to achieve?

The only thing I would say that not necessarily for me but for FAC in general. It might also help us get around human bias and blindspots.

If you could track your progress, what type of metrics would be useful to you?

I think progress bars more useful than bar charts, generally speaking having different views in terms of weekly view/ daily view and overall view. High, medium, low in terms of measuring things, I like these kinds of measurements to be kept simple. And some gameification is always nice.

How much time would you ideally invest in tracking your progress?

Realistically I would probably use it for the first week and then not again, If the course was done through the app and would then link back to the different courses as needed a bit like the FCC shell, I would be a lot more likely to use it because it would be much easier. In terms of how long I wouldn’t want it to be more than 5/10 minutes

If a progress tracker app would be useful to you, would you want it to work with 		other resources (e.g. non FAC, non Github.)

Factor in pre-application stuff and how it could support applicants, then they can get used to it before they start the course. My organisation was not so good and because the pre-requrs were quite scattered doing them could feel quite disjointed at times. In terms of after the course it’s difficult because everyone’s plans are so different it would be hard to please most people.

Would it be useful to see your peers progress with workshops?

If they haven’t done it because they are lazy it might help motivate them. However the more common case might be that they are struggling or they don’t get it. There is the potential that something like that could make them even worse. You could have a feature that alerts the mentor or pastoral career instead though. Could be a dashboard that the carer could access. From my experience for some of the students it could have demotivated them even more if they could see it.

Who

What

When

Where

Why

How

Hypothesis

About the Interviewee ( 3 mins) 👩 👨

• name, age (or age range)

  • Clio, 24-30
    what FAC cohort were you?
  • 4

• What did you do before and after the course?

  • TV documentaries, general admin role in a startup
  • works for dwyl (c.2 years)

• Do you know what type of learner you are?

  • depends on the type of task - e.g. knitting is kinaesthetic, coding is similar
  • key is variation in learning / suitability to the type of learning

• What was your last learning experience before the course?

  • formal = university
  • TV = workshops on working with cameras, some self taught stuff

Learning Experience & course curriculum on GitHub 🎓 (7 mins)

• How did you find accessing the course curriculum on GitHub and what did you find most and least helpful in the information to enhance your learning?
  • wasnt well organised, her cohort was responsible for much of the updating
  • -ve: a bit patchy, didn't know what to follow, and when, wasn't the most recent version
• How often have you revisited the curriculum during and after the course?
  • during course: as going along, go to gitbook
  • since: not at all, dwyl uses a different stack, and dwyl has more relevant learning resources
• Can you list any pros and cons of course materials
  • pros: things that worked, workshops without bugs were best, things with good instructions
  • cons: things that are incorrect and missing in materials.

Organising and navigating online learning materials 📂 (6 mins)

• How do you organise and navigate your general online learning resources?
  • use notes program on apple computer, writes notes down constantly. Need to know what you are doing today and the next day etc. Constantly updated to do list. This is not complicated. Online management systems often too complicated for the task at hand.
  • Google stuff for resources
  • Exlixir docs, Pheonix docs, etc.
• What online learning platforms have you used? If so what progress indicators did you like?
  • All FAC prerequisites
  • Progress bars, everything everyone else likes
  • Not sure of progress indicators ability to help you carry on
  • The final goal more of a motivator
  • Better to have things in manageable chunks

Monitoring / Tracking of your progress on the Course 📊 (7 mins)

• How do / did you track your progress through FAC workshops at present? If not, why not?
  • Probably didn't, not enough time
  • She minded letting go of keywords, e.g. callback. Every time she heard something she didn't know, she would write it down, then read up about it on the way in to the course on the tube. Understand these keywords that could crop up in her own time / downtime.
• Do you think it would have been helpful to monitor progress? If so, what would you have liked to monitor?
  • Depends on why you want to monitor
  • Too much data
  • Need to understand why people want to measure progress
  • No exam to pass at the end, if there were, it would be relevant
  • Risk making people competitive
  • Would be useful for people who like to complete things
  • Could be offputting to those who are behind
  • Could be useful for course facilitators - e.g. shows what workshops noone managed to complete.
  • Useful to review previous work
• Was there any reason that you did not complete all of the workshops/challenges on the curriculum?
  • lack of time
• Would an app that allows you to track your progress throughout the course provide value to you?
  • for a course facilitator / mentor / someone who decides the syllabus, yes. For a person on the course, probably not

Use of, and features of a potential MVP 📋 (5 mins)

• What do you believe an app to track your progress would help you to achieve?
  • probably not a lot
• If you could track your progress, what type of metrics would be useful to you?
  • in the application phase, this could be useful
  • could show how long other people have taken to complete the prerequisites, for example
  • this would be useful, as most see number of websites to complete, not the actual amount of time it takes to work through them
• How much time would you ideally invest in tracking your progress?
  • would be good to get it to automatically track
  • would not be into it otherwise
• If a progress tracker app would be useful to you, would you want it to work with other resources (e.g. non FAC, non Github.)
  • with automation, it would need to - e.g. work with freecodecamp, codewars, etc.
• Would it be useful to see your peers progress with workshops?
  • no
  • it would probably rub it in that some people aren't keeping up.

User Story:
As a student when I am not on the dashboard I can return to it via the footer.

• As a student they can navigate to the dashboard when on another page via an icon on the footer
• A a student they can easily see their index page via the footer
• A a student they can click a back button via the footer

Initial setup of project

Dev Ops-ish bits

• Travis CI
  • add environment variables (including codecov token)
• Codecov
• eslint and prettier (with config file)
• Heroku
  • Create app
  • add / export database with Heroku CLI
  • add environment variables

File Setup

• express handlebars setup (display a route)
• database schema
• database build script
• reset / basic css

User Story:
As a student when I can go back a page I can return to it via the footer (back button).

• I can click on a back button on the footer to retrace my steps through the app.

User Story:
As a student I can add notes to a workshop/ challenge.

Acceptance Criteria

• I can add notes to a workshop by clicking on a text box.
• When I click on the text box my keyboard appears that I can edit, add or delete.
• A user can save the text by clicking on a save button

Skateboard: First Step, as recommended by the Clio

Relates to #44 , #33
Output dummy data to populate UI

• query first user, get all talks, and empty values #issue 33
• button links to weeks from dashboard (before charts)
• week view shows week name, and outputs dummy data for tasks
• task view shows task title and description

• serve pages relating to week name in the url (dynamic routing in express)

1 ) Select the subject with one task remaining and mark the incomplete project as complete.

• Selects toolkit week.
• Selects the unshaded workshop box
• Updates the checkbox if they have completed the workshop or challenge
• Clicks the save button.
• Navigated back to the view of the week with the workshop shaded

2 ) Go to the subject with nothing completed, choose the first workshop and log your confidence as high in that subject.

• Select Express Week
• Select Workshop a
• Click the green traffic light
• The light changes colour
• Click Save
• Navigates back to Week 8 view

3 ) You want to brush up on your authentication skills, go and have a look at the challenge where you have the lowest confidence and increase your confidence indicator in it.

• Go to Authentication Week
• Select Challenge 3 (Red)
• Select yellow/ green button.
• Button changes colour.
• Clicks submit.
• Redirected to a updated week view

4. You have found a really usefull Node 2 link, go and add it into workshop b notes.

• Got to Node 2 Week
• Select Workshop b
• Select text box
• Text box fills with text
• Click Save
• Redirected to Week view

Relates to #32

• setup express handlebars
• serve a route for home

presentation feedback - FAC Track
Jihun - would be useful to have a todo list checkbox per task - to revisit a task

add description for the challenge

repo link perhaps not ideal for mobile

Sak - way to add time / expected amount of time per task (write in notes!)

group average time to complete?
would be good to have a progress indicator per task (rather than a complete or not)

Michal - SGC workshops we couldn’t get through a lot of the steps

save what step you got to in the task
analytics: could see what task people are commonly getting stuck at
Charmaine: some didn’t have tasks, hard to quantify data
Harry:

people have a lot of strong opinions, touch challenge
first FAC based project he’s seen that he might use
did the right testing
what a dude! ❤️
Sak

well done for changing stuff and being open to feedback

Team members to Learn Scss basics

• dedicate some time to learning sass
  a workshop is here

User Story:
As a student I can click on a link to the external github repo

• A external link will take user from the input page to a Github repo of the task they are viewing
• This link will open up a new browser tag

Look at error handling workshop before embarking upon this. Seriously.###

It is good, and makes sense.
At least check out the solutions files, you won't get rick rolled again Jason!

• Create a frontend form to send data
• Create a fetch request to send and receive data to and from the backend
• Incoming data gets posted to database
• Get the feedback table after data has been posted
• Display results in the browser

Reaserch Analysis

About the interviewee

• Naz uses the same curriculum: usefull for more than just london. (Matt)
• Self taught learner: we all are because of pre-reqs. (Harry)
• Struggles to hear: would be good for visual people (Sandra)
• Course info is dispirate: we want our data simple (Matt)
• Would be nice if app synced with internet (Matt)

Learning experience and course curriculum on github

• Useful to be comfortable with github because we use it professionally (Matt)
• Have re-visited the course curriculum many times (Rob, Harry, Sandra, Matt)
• Folder full of morning challenges/ workshops (Rob, Sandra)
• No cohesive over view of everything in the course (Matt)
• Some days in NAZ are spent helping other students to catch up (Matt)
• Gameification and intstant gratification (Matt)

Organising and Navigating

• Storing links would be helpful (Rob)
• Master document for links and notes(Harry)
• Uses 'bear' app which markes thing as key words which makes them searchable(Harry)
• If I didnt understand something I noted it down and looked it up on my commute (Cleo)
• Tracking element would be really good but monitering would be better for FAC staff and carers.
• Simple but pleasing progress indicatiors like badges and trophies (Harry)
• Pro of everything being on github, eveyrthing can be reviewed (Harry)
• I liked the drop down style of curriculum on Free Code Camp (Sandra, Rob)
• I like the idea of checking off tasks (Rob)
• Having a final goal / having things in managable chunks helps motivate me (Cleo)
• Tried to keep notes (Matt)
• progress indicators help you see gaps in knowledge (Rob)
• coursera and edex liked experience and user journey (Matt)

Tracking and monitering

• lacked the time to track progress, ideally a tracking system would be automated (Cleo, rob, sandra)
• I didnt track my process as no one else was (harry)
• would be helpful to monitor progress Crello like CAMBAM (harry)
• not enough time to track progress, I used my own to-do list (Cleo)
• An end exam would be useful to measure progress (Cleo)
• Monitoring could be useful for course facilitators on a personal level im not sure an app would be useful(Cleo)

Features

• Might help get around human bias/ blindspots (Matt)
• could have data available for pastoral carer/ course leaders (cleo, rob, matt, harry)
• The simpler the better but probably best not to share scores with other students (Rob)
• Would be nice to include pre-application people (Matt, Cleo)
• integration with FCC & codewars (Cleo)
• Would be good to have reminders (Sandra)
• Help develop good habits (Harry)
• Confidence indicator in subject workshop would be good: traffic light : low/medium/high (Rob, Sandra, Matt)
• Didn't want to show peer progress (Cleo, Matt, Rob, Sandra)
• As short of a time to use as possible (Harry)

Insights

• Include prospective students(Martin)
• Like the idea of conficence level
• Potentially include a tick box that says 'willing to help others' which would then appear as "maybe you could work with _____ ".
• Traffic lights.
• It might be useful to track process and accses workshops and challenges, monitoring might be usefull for someone else to take control of.
• Vertical structure would be created by the above system although FAC is supposed to be horizontal. Management increases external accountablity.
• Older cohorts thought it was a lot less disorganised. Jumps in instructions / not enough hints cause problems. Master reference wasn't available untill FAC10.
• (automation) Does github have a webhook ?
• Links : would be nice if there was a notes section

• create a logo partial that can be used on each and every page
• create a menu on each page with the name of the current index, back button and to dashboard

Scrum Master - Jason & Martin
DevOps - Martin & Jason
QA - Charmaine
UX Lead - Hannah

Hack MD

FAC TRACK

The problem is that students go through the course and dont know what they have completed or not.

• this could be for people on the course or for people doing pre-reqs.
• review of how you found the workshops

Research areas

• past surveys from FACs (relevance)

Monitoring/tracking in other areas

1. Studies about how people learn have shown that when you pay attention to what and how well you are learning, your learning improves. Remembering and applying new knowledge and skills become easier when you keep an eye on your progress while learning something.

Source URL

2. Four ways to monitor your learning

• Curriculum based monitoring tests
• Observation and interaction
• Frequest Evaluations
• Assessemnt

Source URL

3. The strategy of tracking student progress on specific learning goals is well supported. When students track their own progress on assessments using graphic displays, the gains are even higher. On average, the practice of having students track their own progress was associated with a 32 percentile point gain in their achievement.

What gives the best Results?

• Address a single goal in all the assessments.
• Use rubrics instead of points

Source URL

4. Student self-monitoring is an effective tool for behavior change. Self-monitoring has two components, measurement and evaluation (Loftin, Gibb, & Skiba, 2005): That is, the student (1) measures and records his or her own behavior (measurement), and then (2) compares that recorded behavior to a pre-determined standard (evaluation)

Source URL

5. To support the teaching of an international cohort with diverse educational backgrounds, Dr Sharmina Mawani, from The Institute of Ismaili Studies (IIS), introduced an online Learning Record Sheet (LRS) for completion by students following their weekly lecture. The LRS makes students more aware of their progress in the module, based on the specific criteria that they set for themselves, so their learning becomes a very personal endeavour. This is the first time an online task of this nature had been introduced to the MA on the Secondary Teacher Education Programme.

Source URL

• E- learning (Martin's Research)

• • Systems for coding include FreeCodeCamp, Treehouse, and Udacity
  • Free Code Camp contains:
    • A forum for help and discussion
    • A curriculum (small exercises get checked off, usually consecutively, as the user completes)
    • News (a blog section)
  • Treehouse contains:
    • Code- along video tutorials
    • Downloadable files to work on and complete
    • Links to external resources
    • Forums for help and advice
    • Check off tutorials you have completed, get badges etc. for completing things.
  • 5 research-led ways to make online learning effective:
    • Actively involve the learner (e.g. through forums on CodeWars, etc.) A lot of e- learning platforms are passive, students follow code- alongs and video- tutorials, and do not interact with others.
    • Foster collaboration between students - it is easier for students to identify with their peers than their tutors
    • Recognise cultural differences - some people may percieve themselves to be less competent, and less likely to enroll on an online course due to their race, religion, or background. Personal statements of students who have gone through a course - their reservations, and changes of heart, can help aid participation from a wider background.
    • Encourage self- governance - students who set personal goals, even if they don' relate directly to the course materials, tend to be more successful.
    • Use humor strategically - humour helps us to relax, which can expand our capacity to retain information

• Displays / UI

  • Simple display of what you have learned (design)
  • fit bit

• How do people learn the best from a curriculum?

Assumptions List (to question...)

• Members of FAC cohort want to complete all workshops and challenges throughtout their time on the course.
• They prioritise finishing workshops over working on personal projects in their free time
• They learn in a better, more structured way when working through workshops
• They prefer to base their education around the FAC curriculum over any other system
• A coding logbook is required to give a clearer indication of completeness than Github can
• They would find it useful to share logbooks, and view other cohort members notes(to review)
• This system will only be useful for students of FAC and maybe future students
• We only need to ask students of FAC for their opinions on the system, and what it should include

Hannah's Reaserch

• Jerry Seinfeld popularised the techniqe "Don't Break the Chain." This is the idea of ticking things off on a calendar as you go along. Consecutive ticks create a 'chain' and creates pressure in the learner 'not to break the chain'. In other words the more consecutive days someone commits to something the less likely they are to skip a day. This is a techniqe that is used by many websites including github.

  • https://lifehacker.com/5886128/how-seinfelds-productivity-secret-fixed-my-procrastination-problem
  • https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurencebradford/2018/02/10/5-ways-to-stay-on-track-as-you-learn-to-code-in-2018/#5d2ae7e436a7

• High Expectations – Motivation or Pressure - Debate

  • high expectations are good

    • Calvin Lloyd: ‘Nobody rises to low expectations’
    • Geoff Masters: 'Success in most fields of endeavour depends on an ability to visualise success.'
    • Pressure isn’t necessarily bad – it can enhance motivation, concentration and enjoyment. That feeling of stress that often accompanies a pressure situation can help keep you on your toes, ready to rise to a challenge.’

  • high expectations are bad

    • if there are high expectations it can lead teachers (or in our case the students themselves) to push the students in a certain direction without space for thinking what they are good at or developing other skills.
    • high expectations have been shown to have a positive effect on self-esteem and achievement, they need to be matched with support, resilience and the strategies to attain the end goal. (can our app give the support, resilience etc).
    • ‘reasonable expectations can be a positive pressure in your life, [but] too much pressure can cause you to burn out.’

source: https://www.is.vic.edu.au/news/dialogue/all-posts/high-expectations-motivation-or-pressure

This is a large company who have made an open source company wide (200 emplyees) skill tracker. https://www.netguru.com/blog/track-skills-200-people-working-netguru

• Tracking learning makes it easier to manage it. This can be seen in the need for companies to manage thier employees skills as well as parents wanting to be kept up to date with their childrens ability. In the case of FAC Tracker this would allow us (the individual learner) to manage our own learning.
  • source: https://bulletjournal.com/blogs/bulletjournalist/how-effective-is-bullet-journaling-for-project-managers

Habits and Routine are pretty core to learning for everyone.
- source: https://www.developgoodhabits.com/self-education/

• Habit tracking website: https://habitica.com/

Charmaine's research

What do people find useful when learning?

https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/learning-strategies/

combining words with visuals. Have information accompanied with some kind of visual. Include diagramming, sketching, and creating graphic organizers.

create concrete examples to explain abstract ideas.

Common knowledge tells us that to learn a skill, we should practice it over and over again. While repetition is vital, research says we will actually learn that skill more effectively if we mix our practice of it with other skills. This is known as interleaving.

Students should ask themselves open-ended questions about the material, answer in as much detail as possible, then check the materials to make sure their understanding is correct.

Practice bringing information to mind without the help of materials.

Space out your studying over time.

The muddiest point technique
The muddiest point technique involves asking students to write notes on the most unclear or most confusing element of a given homework assignment, lecture, or class discussion.

five monitoring techniques that enhances learning.
https://blog.learningsciences.com/2017/12/01/five-monitoring-techniques-that-deepen-student-learning/

Professor Geoff Masters says it’s important that students have an understanding of what’s expected of them, that they’re involved in the process of setting goals for their own learning and that they have the opportunity to monitor the progress that they’re making in their learning.

Principles

• Don't work on your own if you can help it but if you want to work at home:
  • Talk about it first.
  • Backdrive someone through.
• Catch up at the end of the day and in the morning.
  • Chunk work to manage commits.
  • Push at the end of the day.
• White boarding iteratively
  • this helps people like Martin understand plain English with pretty p

• test post requests in pgcli / psql
• write and test post requests with jest example I worked on using tape
  • check if test database is built correctly with console logs
  • run the post query after build

First ideas for UI appearance, features, and how they help to achieve User Stories.
Turn your computer upside down to view...

User Story:
As a student I can log the completion level of a workshop/ challenge.

Acceptance Criteria:

• I can mark a task as complete by clicking a checkbox
• As a student I will be able to see a tick marker showing my selection made
• As a student I can save my choice

User Story: I can see a list of all weeks and all workshops for each week in the browser

Take the get request data and display in the browser

• Test database query in pgcli / psql
• Write successful database tests
• Display the name/topic of each week on the dashboard
• Display all workshops for each week when viewing an individual week
• Display completed and confidence for a specific user

User Story
As a student I can click on a specific week and see a list of workshops and challenges.

Acceptance Criteria

• I can see a list of workshops which matches the online coursebook.
• I can navigate back to the dashboard by clicking a button on the footer.

Next
User details to output to week view

Relates to issue #32

• Setup 4 tables
• Setup local

• using jest
• setup server route to test a page in successful

• get all tasks from week 1

Acceptance Criteria

• I can easily see all subjects
• I can see my progress shown as a fraction.
• I can see me progress shown visually as pie chart thing.

• When a student clicks on a task within week/task list, dynamically display the name on the log page
• When a student clicks on a task within week/task list, dynamically display the repo link on the log page, as a button or hyper link

About the Interviewee

• name, age (or age range)
  • Rob, 28
• what FAC cohort were you?
  • 7
• What did you do before and after the course?
  • worked at a delivery company, after, have just been a developer at DWYL
• Do you know what type of learner you are?
  • Through repetition mainly, not entirely sure. Depends upon what you are trying to learn.
• What was your last learning experience before the course?
  • Mainly school, went to college for about a month

Learning Experience & course curriculum on GitHub

• How did you find accessing the course curriculum on GitHub and what did you find most and least helpful in the information to enhance your learning?
  • Didn't ever access the curriculum really, now much more of a focus. My experience wasn't very structured.
  • People were writing resources, FAC repo was there, was disorganised, no course facilitator, people who did facilitate were working
  • Very loose schedule, more downtime
• How often have you revisited the curriculum during and after the course?
  • Some quite a few times, to get a better understanding
  • revisited recursion
  • made a folder of morning challenges to work through in own time
• Can you list any pros and cons of course materials

Organising and navigating online learning materials

• How do you organise and navigate your general online learning resources?
  • Did a bad job at the time, did it locally, didn't know better at the time
  • Made a clone of a workshop / resource, made a new local branch, worked well at the time
  • Now would store links (browser bookmarks)
• What online learning platforms have you used? If so what progress indicators did you like?
  • Code Academy. Didn't like as it hands you the answer most of the time
  • CodeWars - good for problem solving. Realised it wasn't very applicable once he got on the course, didn't link together html, css, and js
  • Progress indicators generally good - how much is left. Good to see gaps in knowledge. Helps fight against laziness, but can see how it could make people disheartened

Monitoring / Tracking of your progress on the Course

• How do you track your progress through FAC workshops at present? If not, why not?
  • Didn't track strictly
  • Went back to see things he struggled on, and get a bit more understanding
• Do you think it would have been helpful to monitor progress? If so, what would you have liked to monitor?
  • Yes. The more things you can monitor, the better
  • Since we learnt github early, it would be nice to see people push their workshops back up - see how far everyone got
  • This would be useful for facilitators, if not the students on the course
  • If one person is struggling, then they can see who can help them - who has got further, and who to ask for help in getting up to speed
• Was there any reason that you did not complete all of the workshops/challenges on the curriculum?
  • course moves quickly
• Would an app that allows you to track your progress throughout the course provide value to you?
  • I think so
  • Would make it easier to see gaps of knowledge, and identify weaknesses

Use of, and features of a potential MVP

• What do you believe an app to track your progress would help you to achieve?
  • (see above - address knowledge gaps)
• If you could track your progress, what type of metrics would be useful to you?
  • hard to measure, not sure
  • different morning challenges are different lengths
  • JSON suggestion - a confidence metric per user
• How much time would you ideally invest in tracking your progress?
  • If automated, and asked how confident or something simple, it would be good, and would be likely to use it.
  • Something with a lot of admin would be offputting
  • Would be good if it had links to all of the relevant resources
  • Could be good to fill in confidence in a subject at end of week, e.g. during SGC on friday.
• If a progress tracker app would be useful to you, would you want it to work with other resources (e.g. non FAC, non Github.)
  • maybe, other resources have their own metrics on them though
  • not sure this would work well, top much admin
• Would it be useful to see your peers progress with workshops?
  • don't know, this would work if the cohort got along well, as are in to peer led learning and helping each other out
  • other cohorts have had big gaps in ability, and not as good attitudes
  • very dependent upon peoples attitudes
  • probably best not to share with students, maybe the upper echelon

Goal - to support learning by showing progress and confidence data
Stakeholder - FAC student
Journey - I can observe my progress in relation to the fac curriculum and fill in the gaps in my knowledge
Tweet - FAC TRACK your workshops to max your learning experience.

• display a dynamic route with express (match /task/{whatever the task is called} to template)
• show basic details about the task from the database

• invoke db query via a specific route
• link the database index.js file to the router and access the query by using dot notation.

• get request from the database of confidence of users week
• display this overall aggregate figure on the dashboard

User Story:
As a student, when I click on a workshop/challenge I can input my confidence level for a particular task.

Acceptance Criteria:

• I can log my confidence in a workshop by clicking a traffic light coloured radio button (labelled low, medium and high)
• I can save the changes that I have made.

Functional

• Once the save button is clicked the database is updated with any changes.

Commit messages are really important for understanding a project - both for internal and external stakeholders. Remember when you write your commit messages that these students projects may be viewed by potential employers in the future and your next project will be viewed by a client.

Be careful about what you write both in terms of how descriptive it is and how they might be viewed in the future. Get into the habit of writing more descriptive commit messages - like "fixes bug where image doesn't load on homepage" rather than "fixes bug".

User Journey
As a FAC student, I can log and review my progress and confidence on different tasks for different weeks on the course.

Acceptance Criteria

CAVEAT: Try not to think of tasks / issues as being confined to views. This approach risks building wheels, rather than a full skateboard! Callabunga dudes!

User Accounts

• Review my progress and confidence in different tasks for different weeks on the course.
• Create an account or sign in signup #28

Dashboard

• See my overall progress achieved for the different weeks on the dashboard issue #19
• See my aggregate confidence level for different weeks via an indicator on the dashboard
• As a student I can click on a specific week and see a list of workshops and challenges

Week View

• can tell which tasks are completed and how confident I am in them.

Task View

• log my confidence level on a workshop/ challenge. issue #22
• log the completion level of a workshop/ challenge. issue #24
• add notes to a workshop/ challenge. issue #25
• link to the external github repo issue #29
• As a student when I am not on the dashboard I can return to it via the footer issue #26
• As a student when I can go back a page I can return to it via the footer (back button). issue #27

• Test the database query using jest, to pass.