Learning something as a complete beginner can be daunting: it is often difficult to know where to start. To learn effectively, we must set clear and measurable learning objectives to direct our education. Objectives should allow us to answer questions like this:

• Which concepts are we trying to understand?

• What skills should I have after my course of study?

• What evidence do I need to demonstrate my understanding?

With clear objectives in mind, we can continually evaluate our progress by checking against these objectives. During the course, you must evaluate your progress against a sprint’s success page. For each sprint, the success view lists all the learning objectives for any prep and workshops. It serves as an overview of your learning outcomes for a sprint. Use this view to evaluate your progress.

A module also has a success page, listing the overall learning objectives set by the Global team. At the beginning of a module, review the objectives to understand what you are working towards. At the end of the module, review again to check you’ve met your learning goals.

📝 Check

• Check you can locate the module success page for the How our curriculum works module

Often learners try to rush through the curriculum by completing the coursework without evaluating their work. However, our ultimate goal is to build understanding and learn new skills. Our coursework is the means of achieving this goal but not the ultimate goal itself. Learning without evaluation will lead to weak or absent comprehension.

Therefore, code reviews are essential for evaluating our work. They aren’t about grading; they initiate a dialogue starting with constructive feedback about a piece of work. This means you reply to the comments and make changes based on this feedback. This is how you develop your skills. The learning comes from reading and responding, from participating in this dialogue.

Code review is also one way we develop professional technical communication, which is one of the most valuable skills we can give people on this course.

👣 Next steps

• Join the #cyf-code-review channel on Slack
• Check the time of the next code review session
• Locate any unreviewed pull requests for a particular cohort

📝 Check

• Check out our guides on reviewing

Codewars is an online code challenge platform that allows users to hone their skills on thousands of katas. The platform is useful for developing problem-solving skills and improving your fluency in a programming language. Another key advantage is immediate feedback. Users can check their programming solutions with pre-built test suites, gaining very quick feedback on their progress.

👣 Next steps

• Join the CodeYourFuture clan on Codewars
• Check out the CodeYourFuture authored collections on Codewars
• Practice a kata 🚀 😎

In practice

• Figure out how to train on Codewars katas and navigate their interface with a training example.

This is important for a few reasons:

1. It will give you practice to help build your skills.
2. It will help you to check that you understand everything you’ve been taught, as well as why it’s useful.
3. It will provide an example you can use to prove to other people (e.g. employers) that you can do what you say you can do.