Week 1: Course Introduction

So a couple of weeks ago I started a course up at the Tapton house campus of Chesterfield College; the course is a foundation degree in applied computing, run by Sheffield Hallam University.
In the first week we were told to brainstorm our hopes for the course and plans for after we finish it, as well as building our team working skills and getting to know the people that we're going to be spending the next couple of years with. This first post will be solely about that awkward first week.

We discovered that some of us had been to Tapton previously on some of the BTEC courses - myself being one of them - and some of the class hadn't the slightest clue that this was part of the college, so the tour of George Stephenson's old pad was only useful to about half of us (A Wikipedia article. Blasphemy! The college won't like that).
The entire group is interested in doing something in a very specific area of computing, so this course is the best thing to sliced bread to all of us; some of us want to go in to networking; some of us want to go in to a more media and entertainment-oriented area of computing. It's all good.
We were already sick of hearing the words, "module handbook", and so by the end of the first week we were seeing the things in our sleep - haunting us like document-shaped ghouls.

Our week consists of two half days on Wednesdays and Fridays and a full day on Thursdays. Some of us don't quite see the point in doing three days when we could squeeze Wednesday and Friday together and have two full days, but there's not a great deal we can do to change that.
(I am writing this post after my third week on the course and twice I have had to catch the bus in because the guy I car pool with has fallen sick, so that seems to be a bit of a disadvantage to coming in for just a couple hours on a Friday).
The real tragedy is the fact that Friday's lesson is perhaps the most important to me, you see. Friday is programming day; we have Programming Concepts and that is the main reason I signed up to this course.
I'd coded before on the BTEC course (Visual Basic and ActionScript (yuck)), but I'd forgotten everything I'd been taught because of the gap year that I'd taken. In my time away from education I'd attempted, and failed miserably, to teach myself C++. Yes, VB might be a good language to start out with but I wanted to be able to code in the industry standard language.
So that's what I'm hoping this course will be able to open for me; I want to be able to go to Sheffield Hallam at the end of the two years here at Tapton and learn how to code in C++. 

Now don't get me wrong, I do want other things from this course (even though I won't get a million pounds or chocolate ring donuts), but I'd quite like to be a better team player - I'm rather reclusive and prefer working alone on projects, but that might be half of the problem:
Most, if not all, of the assignments are made for group work and that bugs me a little, because those who don't work well alone won't be developing the skills that are needed for individual work, and working in groups on every single project can be quite cumbersome and overwhelming with the amount of communication that would be needed.

I suppose we'll see where the course go and what happens.
- Alex.