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Tier 1: The Guide

Schedule Overview

AKA: What are you going to learn about during each week of Tier 1?

In order for you to go on and be successful in Tiers 2 and 3, you must have a good working knowledge of the content covered in Tier 1. Here's the general map of Tier 1 content:

Unit Topic
1 Tools: Git, GitHub, Terminal
2 JavaScript: Variables, Conditionals
3 JavaScript: Loops, Arrays
4 JavaScript: Functions
5 JavaScript: Objects and Data

Weekly Content

AKA: What is the general structure of each week of Tier 1?

Required stuff:

  • Engage with one hour of video lecture content.
    • Try actively coding along to apply concepts as you encounter them.
  • Participate in a live, one-hour class on Zoom put on by a full-stack engineering instructor.
    • Every Wednesday from noon to 1:00pm (Central).
  • Participate in a live, one-hour session on Zoom put on by a member of the Student Life or Career Development team.
    • Every Tuesday from noon to 1:00pm (Central).
  • Complete and submit the assignments.
    • Available in the Portal on Monday morning.
    • Due Sunday by 8:00 pm.
  • Answer the discussion question in Slack.

Optional stuff:

  • Full-stack engineering instructor will host at least one one-hour Office Hours session on Zoom.
    • This is a chance for y'all to drop in and ask questions, share thoughts, and/or get to know each other better.

How to Get the Most Out of Tier 1

Put in the Time:

Generally, Prime requires 15+ hours every single week in Tier 1.

If you aren't spending that amount of time it is going to show up in your work.

This time should be a couple of hours every day. It helps you learn and allows for things to go wrong.

What You Need to Do:

These are the things we expect you to be doing in Tier 1:

  1. Attend all classes. Ask Questions.
  2. Complete all assignments.
  3. Submit assignments on time.
  4. Communicate. Tell us what is in your way or if you will be late/absent.
  5. Expose your ignorance. Practice asking for help. This is an absolutely crucial skill that you'll need to build during your time at Prime.

If we notice you are not doing the above, you can expect that we will reach out and want to talk about it.

Assignments:

Every week you will have graded assignments. The challenges within these assignments are what the videos and class content are designed to help you solve.

The ultimate goal for each week of Tier 1 is for you to be actively working through these assignments. You should ask others and compare solutions. Strive to understand, not just complete the work.

Grades:

These are the four possible grade outcomes that a given assignment can receive:

Unit Topic
Missing/Incomplete Not submitted, or insufficient work done.
Reinforcement Needed Base requirements not met. You'll need to fix your code and resubmit the assignment.
Meets Expectations Base requirements are met.
Exceeds Expectations Holy cats! Above and beyond.

These scores are meaningful and represent your progress with the concepts.

Meets Expectations is The Goal:

We expect you to score Meets Expectations on at least 50% of all graded assignments.

The skill of crafting software that behaves as expected is an absolutely crucial one to build. Thusly:

  • Scoring Reinforcement Needed on the majority of your work is not a sustainable trend.
  • We'll ask you to fix up and resubmit the issues/bugs in your code that are preventing it from receiving a Meets Expectations grade.
    • This is an important part of the learning process and career path.

Late or Missing Assignments:

We move fast, and we cannot tell how you are doing without seeing/evaluating your work. Missing or late assignments are a huge deal, especially if you fail to communicate with us about them.

Consequences:

  • If your assignment is more than three days late we will talk with you about what is going on.
  • If you are missing multiple assignments or units of work we may halt your progress with your current cohort.

We need to see your work in order to help you learn to learn at the pace that software developers must.

Resubmitting Assignments:

Tier 1 is the place to build mental models of fundamental programming concepts and familiarity with the syntax required to move on.

If your assignment is scored Reinforcement Needed it will be marked Resubmission Required in the Portal. If/when this happens:

  • Take our feedback and complete the assignment to base requirements.
    • Be sure to ask questions of each other and instructors!
    • If you are stuck, there is something you are ignorant of. The only way to get past this is to expose your ignorance. This is not a bad/embarassing thing!
      • It's nearly impossible to find success at Prime (or this career field) without leaning into this behavior.
  • Your resubmission will have a due date. Meeting the due date is critical!
    • If the stack of "things to fix and resubmit" gets too large, it can become impossible to continue forward in the program.
      • A metaphor: If you lack the conceptual understanding to solve 27 + 102, it wouldn't be educationally effective to attempt solving 33 + 2010.5 - (27 * 102) / 2.

We Want You To Succeed:

In the end, Prime is an intense experience, and we want you to succeed. We have a clear understanding of what the path to success looks like, and we will always put our best effort into helping you figure out what works best for you to stay on that path. 🙂

What we need from you is a willingness to:

  • Take Chances and Make Mistakes: More learning happens when you make mistakes. We ask that you try everything we throw at you. In programming, the answer to how can I make this work? is often only ever found by first answering why is this thing currently not working?
  • Collaborate and Expose Your Ignorance: Our biggest asset in all of this is other humans who have other brains. Specifically, right now, your biggest asset is your cohort. Make the connections and struggle together. You will be stronger together.
  • Ask for Help From Your Instructors: If you're hard stuck on something, and collaborating with your peers has not helped you get unstuck, we expect you to "escalate" your issue. At that point, ask your instructor. (This is what we do as software developers!)
  • Use the Entire Prime Staff for Help - Everyone at Prime desires to help you! That includes all of the staff. We're a diverse bunch of humans with a diverse bunch of experiences, and we're honestly all here for you.