Bootcamp Experience (Day 3)

The infamous Lagos traffic hold up today was something to write home about, the thought of getting to the Bootcamp late is making me unsettled, I had to find a way around, though I paid more, I got there on time!.

It felt good seeing the Bootcampers faces again, most people are by their Computers preparing for the class. I settled down at my corner and further ruminated on the points I’ve gathered on the food for thought that was given to us to research on yesterday, who knows if I’ll be the first person to be called to share today as it was yesterday.

The Instructor walked in just in time, to our surprise she told us all to stand up and step aside from out Computers, not knowing what she planned on doing. She explained as part of out “soft-skills” exercises we will be engaging in, as the Bootcamp is not entirely about Programming alone, She taught us an exercise; outlined below are the steps for the first exercise:

1. do the same for the left hand
2. then raise our left leg and shake it 10 time
3. with your hands in the air, shake your entire body and count from 1 to 10.
4. repeat steps 1 - 4, this time reduce the count by 1.

After the exercise, she explained the next exercise, the exercise was about appreciation. In no particular order, a Bootcamper is to give an imaginary gift to another Bootcamper which the receiver will fictitiously find a name for e.g. iPhone, but before the giver gives, he/she has to first tell the recipient the reason why he/she is giving the gift to that particular person, and the receiver has to show gratitude on receiving the gift, on and on we took turns, it was funny gift objects that Bootcampers came up with, I came up with a “Hover Board” - I’ve always wanted one. We get to give feedbacks after the exercise and constructive criticism was given both by the Instructor and the campers.

Another thing that happened today was that we had an Assistant Instructor, and she…yes SHE was awesome. It was said that the ratio of male to female Andela fellows is 17:1 and my class was blessed enough to have two female Instructors. The Assistant Instructor’s presence was felt as she attended to cases that we would have had to wait for the main Instructor to attend to. The name of the Assistant Instructor is “Yetty”.

The food for though session started, the Topic was “How do you make sure your code works” and unlike the day before, I wasn’t the first person to share, rather I was the last person. It was a long wait, I listened to everyone and learned a lot from them. Being the last person on the Queue gave me more time to gather my thought and be more articulate when it was my turn to share. The Instructor commended how we were more expressive during the Food for Though session compared to other sessions we’ve had.

We proceeded to the programming session, we did some more complex programming (compared to the ones we’ve been engaging in), we were introduced to AndeLabs by the Assistant Instructor, she explained how the activities a Bootcamper partakes in reflects on the Skilltree of Andela. we did two Labs at AndeLabs, then we did some other task that was shared to us on the class’ Slack Channel.

In one of the Labs we were told to Hard-Code (writing on a sheet of paper) what we think the program code should be, I got mine at once, I was so excited; Although the Assistant Instructor pointed out some other ways I could improve the program code for the sake of efficiency - which I implemented. At this point we have exceeded the time we ought to close for the day, our Instructors had to leave. It was a long, interesting and fun day.