Before the start of the semester, the 16 students in our class completed a survey. This page presents some anonymized demographic information from that survey.
About two-thirds of you are sophomores:
A majority of students in this course use she/her pronouns.
Just over half of the class is pursuing some form of hybrid (BXA) major. Most of the students in this course are connected to the School of Art, but we are very glad to include some students from Architecture and Design.
Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, roughly two-thirds of the class is not present in Pittsburgh:
Indeed, students will be attending our course from four different time zones, including one person who is 13 hours ahead, half a world away. We acknowledge the special difficulties of participating in our class at 3 in the morning!
Regarding your level of comfort in JavaScript programming, only one person expressed strong confidence. For the strong majority of you who didn’t: I’m grateful for your honest assessment of your skills! This is super-helpful to me in planning. I hope it’s comforting that you’re not alone 🙂
Lastly, we conducted a “vibe check”, to see how you’re feeling during this challenging time. Half of you stated that you’re doing “as well as could be expected”; about a third of you are feeling “excited to get started”; and a few of you acknowledge that the challenges you’re encountering mean that “it’s complicated”. (One person said that they’re feeling “excited to get started, but also, it’s complicated.”)
On a side note, one thing that was a relief to me (not shown in any diagram here), was that there is nobody in the class who reported the possibly concerning combo: that their coding skills were “poopy” and that they were feeling that their life-situation was “complicated”.