Studying for First Launch School Assessment

Original date: Aug 13, 2017

I started the Launch School free prep course almost three months ago and finished it in just over a month. After that I became a paid subscriber and am winding down the first course, 101: Programming Foundations.

My motivation for embarking on the Launch School journey was simple: after working on my own 15 to 20 hours a week programming through tutorials, books, and code-along exercises, I knew I’d gained a certain familiarity with many of the tools for web development. However, I felt like I hadn’t scratched the surface with actually learning how to program.

I’ve noticed a great deal of improvement in my problem-solving ability with programming, but I also wonder how to further fill the gaps and build my knowledge base. The Launch School curriculum is better than any other programming course or tutorial that I’ve seen — by far. Their approach of ‘fundamentals first’ was exactly what attracted me to the program, and I certainly feel much more confident in approaching simple programming problems. I still struggle with many of the exercises, however.

For example, the Twenty-One game: some of the bonus features challenged me but were within my grasp. Adding a feature to keep score between the player and the computer took time to implement smoothly, but this felt like a realizable goal. Likewise with the bonus feature to alter the winning score and dealer max. It was challenging to figure out, but once I got an idea of how to do it, I was able to successfully add the feature after a little trial and error.

The variable to cache the totals and clean up the total method calls was less successful. After hours of research and tweaking, I could only get the variable to work with the first method call. Any subsequent method calls would interfere with the game logic.

It’s hard for me to determine how ready I am for the first assessment. I read a few blog posts by other students, some of whom studied hours a day on Codewars.com and other code practice sites. I’m certainly willing to do this — this was actually an approach I was going to take in order to improve my coding skills before finding Launch School — but I might spend weeks or even months doing this before I felt comfortable enough to try the first assessment.

While writing this post I started thinking back exactly a year and a half ago when I took the first of two exams for the A+ certification. I had studied diligently for three to four months before I decided to schedule the exam. Was I ready? I certainly didn’t know for sure at the time. Had I learned the material? Such an exam covers a sprawling scope of information, but I decided at some point that the only way I’d know if I was ready or not was to actually set a date for the test and focus on being as ready as possible by that date.

This approach worked well! I passed the first exam by quite a large margin and felt emboldened to take the second exam a month later. I passed that one as well, and I continued that momentum for another five months and passed a total of five IT exams. I realize that programming is completely different — primarily since it is skill based. I’ll need to demonstrate what I can *do* and how well I understand the code. That though definitely makes me nervous at the moment, but my hope is that studying for the assessment will help spotlight my weaknesses. I also plan on talking to other students who are preparing for the exam and will participate in online study sessions. I’ve only interacted in the chat rooms a small bit — mostly to ask for help figuring out where I’m stuck with some code — but I’ve also had conversations with other new students who feel a little intimidated, and that makes me feel a little less isolated. Hopefully studying with other students can help me realize how to improve in areas that I’m far less comfortable than I should be.

We’ll see, but that first assessment will be coming soon…