My breakable toy is officially complete!* For my breakable toy, I created a way for teachers to assign a video and an assessment for homework and then have student analytics from the assessment to better inform instructional decisions in the classroom to make class time more purposeful. Check it out or check out the code.
To reflect on the learning experience of building something from scratch, here are five things I learned:
- Have a good mock up/wireframe of what the final product is going to look like. When I wrote tests, I realized that I had a 70-80% idea of what my pages were going to look like, so I needed to break from coding to design again. If design was done at the beginning, I would be able to let my design drive my coding.
- Outside in testing is awesome and efficient . Although it is tempting to cowboy code and throw stuff together, having the diligence to always write tests first made refactoring my code a lot easier. For example, I first wrote a query that looped through my database multiple times. This got my tests to pass and got me the result I wanted, but it was hitting my database way too much for good performance. Because I had my tests written, it was not too overwhelming to refactor my code to turn my multiple SQL querying into one SQL query.
- Reference your ER diagrams . My classroom flipper app had 8 models with each model having different relationships with each other. The times I got most stuck while working on my breakable toy was when I was trying to navigate the relationship between my models without my ER diagram. Using my ER diagrams helped ground me to what I needed to do.
- Going off that, the I felt most productive when I broke down my tasks into actionable steps . Saying something like I need to create the ability for a student to take an assignment is daunting because there are many pieces to a student taking an assignment. Breaking this down into steps that I was familiar with (ex. an assignment is a submission, I need to first have the student navigate to a new submission page) allowed me to tackle more complex challenges.\n5. Debugger and pry are your friends . One of the things that was confusing at first was what params I was sending where and what information I had available to me. The best way to answer those questions were to go into pry or use the debugger and play around with what I had.
∗ Complete for now, there are tons of features that I want to add on, but I found a good stopping point for version 1.0.