Game of Life Project Tutorial Video

Here’s a new video that shows how to create Conway’s Game of Life using React.

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Honest question (no sarcasm intended and I don’t mean to be abrasive)—what is the point of this?

I thought the whole point of fCC is so that people would do their own research, learn on their own, and learn more while trying to get these projects done. Given that this will be in the Coding Interview Take Home Projects section of the new curriculum, it seems to make even less sense to have a video that walks people through the entire process—if people do get to that point where they could be considered a candidate for a developer job, they don’t need a tutorial like this.

If these videos are meant to solve a potential scaling problem, then I think it’s a pretty terrible idea.

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I’d agree it is pretty dangerous to make such a tutorial just for the fact that people may be tempted to watch it and forget it.

At the same time I know there there are people who will do it alone and then refer to the video to see if there is something they could have done differently.

Also, even if people give in to temptation and watch the clip before coding it there is a certain value to it as they still have to code it, and walking them through step by step has the chance of them doing the project at all instead of abandoning it because it feels too difficult.

On-line courses have a very low success rate, and if this video can help to increase that I’d say that although I do not fully like the idea itself it might be the best bet we have at getting more people to code.

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I see what you are saying, @honmanyau. I definitely think people can learn more by trying to create a project themselves before watching a tutorial. I have been specifically choosing projects from the Coding Interview Take Home Projects instead of the required projects from the new curriculum.

However, I think the tutorials could still be very helpful to people that are stuck or people that may not have planned to complete the take-home projects. Actually, the real hope is that people that are not that familiar with freeCodeCamp will find the tutorials and then afterwards start going through the core curriculum. Before creating this tutorial and my recent tic-tac-toe tutorial, I talked to Quincy about it and he thought it was a good idea to make tutorials about the Take Home Projects. Maybe I’ll try to get some input from more people before my next tutorial.

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There are many reasons why people find a walkthrough video useful. Most of all it inspires people who are stuck and have no idea to get started writing the model and view architecture for a simulation like this one in the React way.

It’s common for React demos to come with a lot of ES6 syntax sprinkled throughout the code so some demystifying is essential for front end developers like me used to accessing and updating the DOM easily with jQuery. Often in React a common error is down not having curly braces wrapped around this.props.myproperty inside of the render() return function which is super annoying when you’re used to classic jQuery selector and assignment syntax.

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Nice bien seeing now¡¡

There are many points that I hadn’t considered when I initially raised the concern. *Scratch head* In particular, I seem to have completely ignored the fact that it’s not part of the core curriculum and that the reverse, and I think more convincing, argument can be made about the usefulness of this type of tutorial to people who are at the point of preparing for interviews.

I stand corrected! :slight_smile:

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