Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Two Down, One to Go
The final class for Open Systems Web Development course was last night. An easy class for me, as it was the exam. Spent Sunday working on some new questions and doing my best to make them a challenge but still make them as fun as possible under the circumstances. I think my favourite was the following piece of code, derived from a site where PHP programmers were quizzing each other:

<?php
$array = array("d", "m", "n" );
echo "GOOD ";
rsort($array);
foreach($array AS $key=>$value)
{
$var = ++$value;
echo $var;
}
?>

It produces "GOOD one" as its output and I also asked the students to tell me why it produces that output. It is just a slight extension to what I taught in class, and hopefully may have sparked some interest to explore this avenue further on their own afterwards.

Other questions involved such things as reverse-engineering data into a MySQL dump format so that you could import it directly into phpMyAdmin (watch out for characters in the list might need to be escaped! ;-), creating a set of common form functions, and devising a regex expression that can correctly handle Canadian postal codes (the leading letter does not run from A-Z) amongst others.

This has been a good class, and for once it was composed of students who were truly beginners -- some had ASP programming experience but not much more than that. This is a course aimed at beginners and it has been problematic in the past whenever there's been hard-core programmers who find the pacing too slow -- but the course is not aimed at them. I could have rested on my existing material, but in the end I developed several new lesson plans -- covering the GD graphics library for the first time for example -- partly to make things more interesting for the students, but also because I like working with new material myself. It's more interesting.

I thought I had made a tactical mistake by handing out the evaluations along with exams -- especially since nobody left the lab early, leaving me thinking that I had pitched the exam too high, and would get duly rapped on the knuckles for it. I was pleasantly surprised to get nothing but kudos for having taught the class when the evaluation forms were handed in (there was one person who thought that the assignments I gave were too stressful, but this came along with kudos for my teaching style). There were several people in the class who expressed interest in the Information Architecture class I’ll be teaching in the spring, so I guess I must have done something right. :-)

My only regret is that in having to be at the classroom as part of my contract, I missed out on my elder daughter's dance recital that was happening at the same time somewhere in deepest, darkest Scarberia. Erika shot me some movies of the event, so I'll get the chance to view everything when I get home this evening.