About 'Explore Thy Neighbour'!

Unity Courses Talk
, ,
#1

In this video (objectives)…

  1. See how + can join strings, and add vectors.
  2. Use try {} catch {} to catch errors.

After watching (learning outcomes)…

Specify a list of allowable directions and "explore" in them.

(Unique Video Reference: 12_RR_CU2)

We would love to know…

  • What you found good about this lecture?
  • What we could do better?

Remember that you can reply to this topic, or create a new topic. The easiest way to create a new topic is to follow the link in Resources. That way the topic will…

  • Be in the correct forum (for the course).
  • Be in the right sub-forum (for the section)
  • Have the correct lecture tag.

Enjoy your stay in our thriving community!

#2

What I like is that this section is now getting deeper into programming. I also love the practical approach of how code is used to create a useable application. However the last few lessons have been a lot more challenging, and I find myself just doing (i.e. just following along), without fully understanding what we are doing. I would suggest a few branch lessons might be in order, to spend a bit more time delving into constants, arrays, lists and dictionaries, including the usage of other statements around these main themes, such as counting elements, manipulating elements, and several other commands associated with lists, arrays and dictionaries. For example, in this section we used the dictionary to set the color with the statement “grid[explorationCoordinates].SetTopColor(Color.blue);”. Very little was said to explain it - for instance is explorationCoordinates the key or the value, and why don’t we need key and value. I like the spiral approach, but it seems that a few rungs have been skipped in the last 4 or 5 sections. Hope this feedback helps to make this course even better than it already is.

4 Likes
#3

I would agree with Sorendark’s input. In the previous sections I was able to do all the challenges and in many cases had already done them by the time they were issued. Suddenly in this section I’m struggling to do any of them and I find myself completely stumped by the issues. Previously you’ve given some hints in the videos if they were hard and if it was possible to get these again it would be great. I’m not sure if I’m being a bit thick but I’m really having trouble keeping up in this section and feel I’ll need to repeat it when I’m done in order to be able to fully grasp everything that was explained.

That said I am really enjoying it. This being the ‘programming’ section is huge fun, incredibly interesting and I feel a drive to try and understand it as best as I am able.

2 Likes
#4

Thank you for this feedback. I’ve planned to look at this next week, and may well insert some new lecture(s) and inform you guy with an educational announcement.

1 Like
#5

I was just thinking this myself, this was the first challenge I had zero clues on how to achieve the goal :frowning: The level of difficulty seemed to jump a lot from previous challenges.

1 Like
#6

I cringed when I saw you using the try/catch for detecting that a block does not exist. I learned early in my programming career that using a catch for expected situations carries an enormous performance penalty. You really should just use ContainsKey on the grid dictionary since you already introduced the method earlier.
The best way from a performance standpoint is to use TryGetValue on the Dictionary since that only looks the item up once (doing an existance check and fetching the item if possible) rather than a ContainsKey and then accessing the object.

1 Like
#7

Hi guys, thanks for the feedback on the challenges. The main thing is to not let yourself get frustrated if the difficulty of the challenge is too steep for you. The process of trying to figure these things out is often just as valuable as the solution because it makes you think about what is happening and why with your code.

Coding is all about practice, so keep pushing forward and absorbing as much as you can. One thing I highly recommend you do is pause the video midway through something being written and see if you can finish it, even if its just adding the last word or last parentheses. The more you can stop and think, the better you’ll find your learning.

#8

I agree with this @John_Fairbanks. We do use ContainsKey in about 5 lectures time according to this Git Blame.

Privacy & Terms