Lydia Chilton

2 assignments per week (shouldn't take more than a couple hours) 1 midterm project 1 final project (The projects take a decent amount of time and effort, but you get a lot of time)

Lydia is a great professor. She is extremely energetic and her lectures are super engaging... which is shame because you really don't have to watch a single lecture (or even look at the slides) to do well in this class... The few times I did attend lectures, the examples of "good web design" were screenshots from the early 2010's (with website design typical of that time period) so I would say this class is a bit out dated. But nonetheless, this class is great at slowly developing your frontend skills from 0 to being able to build a fully functional website. The midterm and final projects are both fun to work on and the deadlines are super lenient. Easy A class, gives you great projects.

12 (almost) weekly assignments (each counted for 5% of final grade), a Midterm project (10% of final grade), Final project (20% of final grade), participation and attendance in TA sessions after Spring Break (10% of final grade). Lecture attendance is not required, and Professor Chilton posts lecture recordings. If you follow all the instructions in the HWs and projects and asked for feedback on your work, you will get a 100%. No A+ grades are given out. BTW: TA sessions are basically these meetings you have with ~10 students and your TA (chosen by you if there's room in the session) each Wednesday after Spring break. Each group talks about their progress on their project/their work in HWs 7-12 and gets feedback from the TA. Before Spring break, lectures were on Mondays and Wednesdays. After Spring break, lectures were only on Mondays, with TA sessions (only 45 mins) being on Wednesdays.

Professor Chilton's lectures are extremely engaging. This class is easy (speaking from someone who doesn't have prior web dev experience). There are only assignments and projects, no exams. Assignments 1-6 helps you practice the web dev stuff you learn in class (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Bootstrap, JQuery, Flask). The Midterm project, which is an individual project, builds on to Assignment 6 (a database website with the topic of your choice) by adding more features and also focusing on graphic design. The Final project, which is encouraged to be done in groups (you choose your own groups as long as your group members are in your TA session, and you can make an exception with your TA to work on it individually), allows you to create a website teaching users a topic of your choice. Professor Chilton highly encourages students to use ChatGPT in their assignments and projects, which made this class easy. However, I would encourage you to still engage with the learning process to really benefit from this class. Even if ChatGPT doesn't help, there are 32 TAs holding OHs every week. Note that Professor Chilton does not give out any A+s. Unlike HWs 1-6 and the projects, some parts in HWs 7-12, which were used to guide students in their final projects, felt like busy work, but I found many parts of them to be very helpful because you can create your prototype and your TA will give you fee…

There were 12 assignments total. The first 6 (before the midterm) were fully individual and exercises in recreating a UI or designing a mini-project. I thought these were super useful and were great practice. I really liked the midterm project, too. But assignments 7-12 felt like 100% busywork. They were all geared toward completing the final project and guiding you along. As someone who doesn't deal well with microassignments that feel pointless, I waited until the last minute and did them all in one night. The final project itself was also pretty chill. I was able to finish half a semester's worth of work in one sitting, so do with that what you will.

Expectations that this would be a fairly easy class. Overall, I think Lydia is an engaging instructor. Then again, I went to about two lectures total. The content of the class was fine, but pretty common sense. Classes would regularly end 30 minutes early and I stopped keeping up with lectures after the midterm.

The class had “biweekly” homework assignments – 12 warm up assignments, then 12 main assignments total (60% of the grade). The last few assignments made up the final project (20%). After that, there was the midterm project (10%), then TA section participation when working on the final project (10%). The final project involved making a website to teach the user something they likely won’t already know in 10 minutes. It was split into multiple phases – coming up with ideas as individuals, narrowing down ideas as a group, selecting final ideas as a group, creating wireframes for the idea, coloring the wireframe, then lastly, coding up the website. The premise was to write it in HTML/CSS/JavaScript since that’s what we worked with throughout the semester, but we were also free to use libraries (Vue, React, Next, etc.). We personally used React with Tailwind and TypeScript. Grading is, again, fairly lenient, though the work itself can feel like a grind to work on, especially if you don’t start early and pace yourself accordingly. However, once you complete everything, you have a good shot of getting an A.

I took UI with Lydia back during the Spring 2024 semester, and I would say it was a mostly solid experience! We had an opportunity to practice our HTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills and put together a project to showcase those skills. We also learned about design principles related to (as the course name suggests) user interface design – namely colors, negative space, gestalt principles, among other concepts. The class had very lenient grading, whereas once certain action items were completed for each of the assignments, full credit was given. I also found it really intriguing that Lydia encouraged the class to use ChatGPT to aid in the completion of the assignments. It created quite a contrast to other courses, where that would be heavily frowned upon. I would say that it’s allowed for by the structure of the class (project-based, and graded based on the nature of the product), compared to other classes, which would incorporate exams and be based on the content of the code used to create a product (and by extension, forbid ChatGPT). For Lydia herself, she was a fairly engaging lecturer and seemed relatively approachable for the most part – I can’t quite say since I’ve never attended office hours. I say “for the most part” for approachability because my group met with her for working on one of the final project phases and she didn’t like our idea and honestly ripped into it quit…