Towards the end of each phase of this course, you'll receive an assessment in the form of a code challenge. This code challenge is a chance for you to show off how much you've learned, see where you are in terms of grasping the material, and get feedback from us on ways to improve or areas to work on further.

The first challenge will cover your knowledge of JavaScript and frontend development. Topics will include DOM manipulation, event handling, and communicating with a server.

For the first code challenge, you'll receive a repo with instructions and deliverables. For example, one deliverable might be "As a user, I should be able to add a comment to a blog post". It's an open-book, totally Googleable challenge. As opposed to standard labs, there will not be tests. Instead, we will be reading, running, and grading your code based on how you fulfill the requirements and your use of coding best practices. We will give you constructive feedback based on your submission.

You can expect feedback after we grade your submission. We'll set aside time for each of you over the subsequent week to review if you don't pass the challenge.

Future code challenge assessments will follow a similar format, but of course, the topics will be different. You can expect any of the topics we cover in class to be touched on in some way. The best way to prepare will be to consistently complete labs, review your lecture notes, and build your own projects.

Please don't think of passing the assessments as the goal of your learning — doing well on them should be a side effect, a by-product of you learning how to be an amazing developer. By all means, get more practice in any areas where you know you need it, but don't cram for a code challenge, and definitely don't sacrifice keeping up with the labs to prepare for it.

Below, we've provided instructions for how to work on and submit your future code challenges. This lesson is structured the same way they will be, so feel free to practice here.

Before you can start working on a code challenge, you must follow the steps below:

• Once your code challenge is published, it will be available in the Code Challenges module of this course.
• Find and open the code challenge assignment and download the linked ZIP file
• Unzip the file on your computer
• In your terminal, change directory (cd) into the unzipped challenge directory
• Run ls; you should see a bin/ directory and a code-challenge.bundle file)
• Run ruby bin/start <your-name> from the directory; this will create a new directory called code-challenge/
• cd into the new code-challenge/ directory and open it in your code editor

To work on your code challenge:

• Ensure that you're in the code-challenge/ directory
• Follow the instructions in the README.md file
• git add . and git commit inside of the code-challenge/ directory often as you're working

To submit the code challenge:

• Navigate to the parent directory of code-challenge/ in your terminal
• Run ruby bin/end, which will create a new file, <your-name>.bundle in that directory (for example, alicia.bundle)
• Navigate back to the code challenge assignment in Canvas
• Upload <your-name>.bundle to the assignment and submit

Reach out to your instructors immediately if you run into issues downloading, working on, or uploading your code challenge.

Use this video to guide you through these instructions: