How This Course Works

After this lesson you can

• Describe how this course's lessons, Check yourself blocks, practice exercises, chapter checks, module assessments and projects fit together

Key takeaways

• The course has six modules. Each one ends with a mini-capstone, a project of its own, and an assessment that passes at 80%, with three tries a day.
• Skills are short "you can do this" statements. They are what the questions test and what your progress counts.
• A wrong answer in Check yourself is useful news, not a failure. Read the explanation, look back at the lesson, and carry on.
• An exercise comes with tests, programs that check your code. It's done when every test passes.
• Covered counts the lessons you've finished. Mastered counts the skills you've shown you know, with three clean answers to questions that come at each skill from at least two different angles.

This course is self-study: you go at your own pace, and the course itself tells you how you're doing. Knowing how it's put together helps you use your time well, so here is what it's made of, and how to get the most from each part.

The shape of the course

The six modules, and the project each one ends with:

Each lesson has a level from 1 to 4. Level 1 is meeting an idea for the first time; higher levels go deeper into the same subject.

Skills: what you'll be able to do

Most lessons start by listing their skills: short "you can do this" statements, such as Write and run a JavaScript program that prints lines with console.log. Skills are what the questions test, and what your progress counts.

Check yourself

Inside a lesson, a Check yourself block asks one to three short questions about what you just read, then shows you the answer and why. Use them as a quick self-test: if you get one wrong, that's useful news, not a failure. Read the explanation, look back at the lesson, and carry on.

Exercises

Lessons whose titles start with Exercise: give you a small exercise: starter code from GitHub, and tests, small programs that check your code for you. You download the starter, open it in VS Code, do the work, and run the tests in the terminal:

node --test

node --test is Node.js's built-in test runner: it runs every test in the folder and lists which pass and which fail. At first they fail, and that's expected. Each part you finish turns its test green, and when every test passes, you're done. Exercises are where reading turns into skill, so don't skip them.

In Module 6 you'll meet a second test runner, Vitest; the idea stays the same.

Chapter checks and module assessments

• A chapter check is a short quiz on the chapter's skills, with a few questions from the chapter before to keep them fresh. Take it whenever you like, as often as you like: it's practice, and it tells you what to review.
• A module assessment ends each module. 80% passes. You get three tries a day, then a 24-hour rest before the next three.

Every attempt draws different questions, so a retake is a fair new try, not a memory test. Most learners take an assessment more than once.

The projects: mini-capstones and the final capstone

• A mini-capstone ends every module: a project you build with everything the module taught, such as the Rock, Paper, Scissors game at the end of Module 1. It comes with a brief, starter files, milestones that break it into steps, and a short checklist, called a rubric, that you score your own work against. Each one is its own project: none of them needs another one finished first.
• The final capstone is the course's final assessment, and there's no big final test. You build an app of your own, put it online, and write a short README that explains how it works.

The projects are what you can show someone: a friend, a teacher, or a company you'd like to work for.

Covered and Mastered

When you're signed in, the course keeps two separate records of your progress:

• Covered: the lessons you've finished.
• Mastered: the skills and key terms you've shown you know. A skill is mastered when you answer three different questions about it cleanly, meaning right the first time and without a hint, and those questions come at it from at least two different angles. For a skill such as add up a list of numbers with a loop, one question might ask what a loop prints, and another might show you a loop that gets the total wrong and ask which line to fix. Answering from two angles shows you understand the skill, not that you remember one answer. A later miss drops it back, so mastery stays honest.

Reading every lesson doesn't mean you know it, and the course never pretends it does. That's why the two are kept apart.

Who gets what

• Everyone, signed in or not, can read every lesson and answer its Check yourself questions.
• Signed in, your answers count toward your skills, and you can tick lessons as done.
• With Premium, or if you own this course, you also get course progress on every page, the chapter checks, the module assessments, and the Certificate of Completion: every lesson covered and every module assessment passed.

A good rhythm

1. Read a lesson, and run its examples yourself.
2. Answer its Check yourself questions.
3. Do the exercise at the end of each chapter.
4. Take the chapter check, and review the skills it points to.
5. When a module's skills are mastered, take its assessment, then build its project.

Check yourself

1 question to try on the lesson page.

So what

The course is built so you always know where you stand: what you've read, what you've mastered, what to practice next, and what you've built.

Key terms

• Unit Test
• Test Runner