Beginner Course on Programming and Coding Fundamentals by Haris Samingan is a great beginner-friendly course that teaches students how to get started on programming with Dart. It is one of the most engaging online courses I have sat through due to Samingan’s unique and vibrant style and does a great job and teaching all of the content in the 2 hour duration.
DISCLAIMER: At the time of doing the course, there seemed to have been some missing assignments where only 3 were showing. If you are not experiencing the same thing, feel free to ignore the respective feedback.
Read more: 5 BEST Online Courses to Learning Computer Science in 2023
Table of Contents
- Course Overview
- Who This Course Is For
- The Breakdown
- Conclusion
- What could I do with the knowledge in this course?
Course Overview
- Skill Level: Beginner
- Price: FREE
- Duration: 2 Hours
- Material: 2 Sections, 14 video lectures, Short Assignments, A free set of notes
- Students enrolled at the time of taking: ~9800
- Course requirements/prerequisites: Basic knowledge of running programs, saving and opening documents (Very minimal!)
- Topics Covered:
- Revolves around the programming language Dart
- How to use the dart.dev online text editor for Dart
- Functions
- Data types (Strings, integers, booleans and nulls)
- Variables
- Relational and logical Operators
- Conditional statements
- Lists
- For Loops
My Rating
Who This Course Is For
Samingan claims that the course is for “office workers, university students or anyone, who wants to learn the fundamentals of coding.” Aptly so, his teaching style fits a broad audience and would be suitable and engaging for anyone. It’s great for anyone interested in getting to know the basics of programming in general or for anyone who wants to learn Dart in a fun and refreshing way with Samingan.
The Breakdown
Teacher and Class material – 4.5/5
First and foremost, Samingan’s teaching style brings an amazing refreshing vibe to an online course that is hard to find. He has had a lot of experience teaching students of all ages from kids to university students, and it shows in his teaching style and attitude.
He accompanies his teaching with very nice slides with graphics that are bright and visual, animations and even sound effects. He clearly put a lot of effort into making this course as engaging as possible and it makes the class more lighthearted while still conveying the lessons.
The course uses an online text editor (dartpad.dev), which is great for a short course such as this one as it removes any installations that students may have to go through that can take time and result in installation issues.
Samingan loves to cracks jokes and has good humor and tone which makes the class very engaging, yet he still manages to teach effectively.
The only real issue for the class material is that there are no assignments after lecture 7, hence, there is no review material in the form of the short assignments for lectures 8 onwards to 13.
Content – 4.7/5
The course is divided into 2 sections. The first is a very short section of 3 videos totalling to 8 minutes of introductions and basic background knowledge required for course. The second sections starts to dive into the actual programming and body of the course.
The content is great and contains everything that a fresh new programmer would need to know to get started writing their first few lines of code. He makes a great effort to break down many key details and present the content in a clear and comprehensive manner. Addtionally, his use of visuals help vastly improve the effectiveness of his teaching.
He even goes on to slightly more complicated topics that are good for beginners to know, such as arrays and loop iterations, both of which are extremely applicable to every programmer. His reference to the Dart documentation is also great in that it allows students to explore additional features of the Dart language on their own following the course.
The only issues here would be that he starts off the course with functions which may be confusing to brand new programmers as a starting point. However, his explanations are clear and conveys the lessons clearly.
Engagement – 5/5
As mentioned, the class engagement for this course is excellent thanks to the hardwork and passion from the teacher. The casual, friendly tone and bright vibrant visuals work extremely well together to produce a course with great flow and engagement.
On top of that, he uses live screen recordings of himself going through the course content on his own online text editor, which is great for allowing students to follow along and explore coding for themselves.
He sometimes asks review questions to test the students’ knowledge by getting them to pause the video and ask, keeping them focused. The assignments that were available were designed well and gave the students room to free play in dartpad.dev, which of course, is the best way to learn.
All in all, the engagement really is one of the strong suits of this course.
Pace – 5/5
He warns students at the start of the course that the pace is going to be very fast. As a 2 hour introductory course, what he says is entirely true, but it does not detract from the quality of teaching and content that comes from this course.
However, his teaching style makes the 2 hours a breeze and a joy to go through. Any student sitting through this would not have the mindset that they have to trudge through the course, but rather, enjoy their first few steps of programming with infectious energy from their teacher.
Value – 4.8/5
Sadly, we had to deduct some value from the overall course due to the missing assignments, however, one big strength here compared to other courses is that he provides a cheatsheet for students to keep after the course, allowing them to have the course’s content at arms reach whenever they need.
Additionally, from finishing this course, students will have FREE access to another course by the same creator, introducing them to Flutter.
So otherwise from the assignments, this course packs great value.
Conclusion
This is a great course for anyone who wants to start their first steps in the world of programming. It delivers all of the content necessary to start coding simple programs in Dart after just a short 2 hour course. Not to mention, with the teacher’s energy and passion, this course is arguably more engaging than most out there, even paid courses. Hence, if you are looking for a enriching course to kickstart your programming journey, this is most definitely the course for you.
What could I do with the knowledge in this course?
- Functions
- Basic arithmetic operations
- Logical operations
- Conditional statements
Combine these and try to create a miniature banking system to track simple arithmetic transactions!
Read more: Python For Beginners, Udemy [In-Depth Course Review]
