Version: WIP

📓 Self-Guided Study Check-In 1

Self-Guided Study Check-In 1

Welcome to your self-guided study. You'll mainly be following along with the plan that you made during the Professional Development Planning section.

Research and Planning Logs

Throughout your self-guided study, you'll want to make sure that you are keeping track of your progress by using a Research and Planning log. What your Research and Planning log looks like will be up to you, but what we want to see is a consistent commit history of your work.

An example of this Research and Planning log might look like this:

research_and_planning.md

### Research & Planning Log
#### Friday, 08/13
* 8:20: prioritize to-dos
* 8:40: research libraries for animations
* 9:30: try out react-spring library, review docs + examples
* 1:20: implement react-spring library in sample project
…

Your instructor will use individual 1:1s to check your progress via your Research and Planning log, and help you adjust your approach as needed. Feel free to bring questions to these meetings, or to ask for assistance during your professional development work.

Please keep in mind that you must work during class time, and your commit history should reflect real, consistent effort.

Whiteboarding Practice

Additionally, keep up with Whiteboarding Practice in the Computer Science section throughout your self-guided study. Coordinate with your Dev teams about when you want to work through practice problems together, and aim to do this regularly.

You'll find example whiteboard prompts there, but you are welcome to bring other prompts if you've already worked through those or if they meet your needs better.

During this section, try to avoid using tools like ChatGPT or Co-Pilot. This is intended to help you with interview preparedness!

To Pair or Not to Pair?

During this self exploration period, choosing how to approach your own material is up to you. If you find that other students are exploring the same materials as you are, you're welcome to work together to share resources, study, or even participate in pairing to create applications while practicing your new technology.

Otherwise, working solo is more than acceptable during this section. There are a few requirements for either scenario.

Requirements

Attendance policy still applies. You are still expected to attend Fidgetech during normal class hours, and sign in and out of Code Central. If you are an online student, we expect you to be in a voice channel in Discord server during normal class hours.
Continue to sign in with a pair. Even though you may be performing independent work, you can still support your peers through this process. We encourage you to help each other with bugs or design decisions.
You may use your own machine. Similar to team week and the independent projects for each course section, roughly half of students will need to bring their own machine. The wifi network will be available during this course section.

Independent Project

There will not be a separate independent project at this checkpoint. Instead, you will continue working through your Professional Development Plan, making adjustments as needed and tying up any loose ends.

There will, however, be a submission due. At this checkpoint, you'll start filling out a Capstone Sign-Up sheet that is intended to narrow any of your current selection of Capstone ideas down into a singular goal and expectation for yourself. If you're still struggling to choose a project, this is the time to think about it and bring it to your instructor.

This sheet will be shared by your instructor, most likely in the form of a Google document, that will be publicly editable in which you will fill out a name and description of the program you have in mind.

At the next checkpoint, you'll define your Minimum Viable Product and research potential tech stacks.

Submission

Submit the link to your Cohort's Capstone Sign-Up Sheet once you've filled in your entry to the Capstone Sign-Ups code review on Fidgetech Code Central.

Visit Independent Projects and Code Reviews for details on how to submit your code, how feedback works and course completion requirements.