Eleanor Sundwall 🇺🇸

“I had a lot of fun working through the different practice problems and seeing everything come together in the homework assignments at the end of each week. Every lesson builds upon the last in a neat, stepwise progression that makes learning feel like a bit of a challenge but not difficult. I appreciate how the answers aren't provided but that students are given the information they need to "Google it" and come to workable solutions on their own. Bonus? My daughters think I'm cool now :) That said: I encountered an issue when submitting my first week's homework assignment that has left me troubled. I replicated the provided example but, after review, I was notified that my homework was incomplete; when I checked to see what the problem could be, the link I had previously followed to the example opened a differently-formatted page. I went to Slack to ask if I would be required to reformat my homework despite my submission being a faithful representation of the original example and was answered with a request to post my question in another channel of slack because it was a "technical" problem; because the turnaround time for answers was slow (an as-advertised ~48hr) and I didn't want to wait (and I want to learn), I went ahead and reformatted the assignment. Still, I have two problems with this: 1. Assignments that require students to copy (nearly exactly) an example document should not be graded in comparison to example documents that did not exist at the time the assignment was completed. 2. A support team should provide support, not direct questions to different channels and then definitions of what "technical" means, even if it does mean something different (and so vague as to be meaningless) to them. I asked a question of the support team that pertained to a philosophical question, not a technical question: Considering that I submitted an assignment based upon an incompletely formatted example (that was available to me), would I be required (by the SheCodes team) to continue formatting my assignment to match an example that did not exist (to my eyes) until after I had submitted my assignment? When I indicated that my question was not technical in nature (I had no difficulties creating a document, coding a document to match the example available to me, or submitting a document), I was told that, essentially, all questions are technical questions and if I want an answer I should submit my questions to the proper channel. This is not a free course and it is alarming to me to be paying for support and receiving resistance, instead. Just an FYI. I am learning a lot, but I am someone who enjoys the Googling and searching and fiddling. If I were taking this course with the idea of getting (and receiving) much support from the support team, I'm not sure how that would be going.”