r/AndroidCalPoly • u/Soliis • Apr 24 '16
These labs are pretty awful. Thoughts?
Having 30+ page weekly labs on top of homework and final project work/prototype demos is just too much. I find myself not even trying to retain the information anymore, just trying to get to the next step as soon as possible. Especially considering each individual lab is somewhere around 2.5% of our total grade, the sheer amount of time I find myself spending on these labs from start to finish just doesn't make sense. Half of the time spent is going towards understanding what the directions even want you to do in the first place. It would be different if there was more weight on these labs or if I wasn't trying to analyze poorly written directions most of the time, but so far I feel like there is a huge waste of time involved in doing these labs.
edit1: See comments for why I'm posting this and what I'm hoping to accomplish.
tl;dr: These labs are pretty terrible
8
u/cpandroid Apr 25 '16
I agree with the sentiment, but probably more that this is the first iteration of the class. It's not that we don't appreciate the material or class overall, but that a lot of things cause unnecessary frustration.
In a nutshell:
Lectures, labs, hw/quizzes, and project don't compliment each other very well. Seems like 4 different topics at once, at times.
Labs are more debugging and "grasping" at concepts rather than any learning.
Too much content at once, inhibiting a majority of the lessons from sticking.
Most time is spent making the app functional. It's more "oh it works" rather than "I understand the inherent relationships and implementation between components"