professor
Celeste Layne

Do not take this class with Celeste. The lectures were incredibly boring and at times she would look at the slide and go "I don't know what this slide is about" and move on to the next. She also presented herself as flexible and easygoing but was not in my experience. The class lectures did not relate to the homework and I think a lot of people in the class had previous javascript experience, but those of us who didn't basically had to teach it to ourselves with webpages she would link. Overall really boring lectures and tedious homework that didn't relate to the lectures. Participation is graded but all you have to do is answer questions in the zoom chat and you can just wait a second and then copy what everyone else said (that strategy probably won't work in person though)

TLDR: HEAVY WORKLOAD if no JS experience, still heavy with, probably. Straightforward A-/A. Celeste is ... an interesting professor. She is kind and easygoing, and the class has ~good vibes~ except for when weird rubric items based on subjective things make you lose points. The lectures are useless, so just be sure to fill out your participation form (participation is 15% of your grade and can be as easy as responding "Yes" at an appropriate interval in the zoom chat. Yes, you can fib on the form with virtually no chance of the TAs noticing). Extensions are generously given, regrades markedly less so. The semester is divided into two pieces: the first half "teaches" (i.e. gives basic demos in class and then sends you off to Google) Javascript, HTML/CSS, and Flask, as well as visual design principles. The homeworks associated with this are either capricious (see arbitrary grading above) or maddeningly difficult. As someone with no previous JS experience the learning curve was shall we say steep. Homeworks range in time from 5 hours on the first to maybe 25 on the fifth. The first half culminates in a midterm project worth 10% of your grade over the course of two weeks. This took about 40 hours. It is as unpleasant as the hours suggest. The second half of the semester was dominated by a "project" which was a lot of tedious "feedback-giving," "iterating," and other design processes. These homeworks can be completed in <2 hours, an insult to the assignments that came before it. The project is very tedious but not difficult. The class is not curved, but unless you slack off it is pretty much impossible to get below an A-.