I've written extensively in a series of marketing materials why I think the Launch Academy experience is different, but in sum, Launch Academy takes the information you can obtain for free on the internet and actually synthesizes it into something you can use. Just for instance, how am I to know that I should learn things in a certain order, or even what I should learn? Should I learn java? Should I learn SQL? As someone who was basically learning free-form, I had no idea. Launch Academy tells me what I need to know and provides feedback on what I'm doing.
Regarding what I've learned this week, first and foremost, it's that there is never simply one solution to the problem. Kat and I worked extensively on Hangman and I was thrilled that we were able to use both an "Until" loop and a "While" loop in order to generate the same information. Minor victories, but victories nonetheless. I also really enjoyed using the katas that were available to us because it's invaluable to produce your own code and THEN see the optimized code, as opposed to struggling through your own code and then simply looking at the answers, which is unfortunately something that has happened to me throughout learning. It simply completely saps the memorization of what you're doing.
Sudocode was a very helpful concept for me to learn, but unfortunately I haven't really put it into practice very much even though quite frankly I probably should have. Just as an example of this, I was working on the List Statistics problem and I wrote out code that was similar to code I wrote last night, when in fact it was unnecessary and riddled with bugs. I wasn't being asked to sort and I'm not sure why I felt compelled to do that other than I had done it in the past. When I really sat down and thought about what I had to do I realized there was a simpler way. Thinking simple and thinking lazy is just so much harder than "doing it" and that's something I need to work on!
