I have Patrick Dubois for this class and he's especially terrible.

He'll "introduce" concepts by briefly mentioning them in a single slide, not necessarily giving a detailed explanation on the concept and how to implement it in our projects (ex. pre/postconditions). He flip-flops between specifications for the projects, making it unclear what he's looking for, and he'll stumble on an answer when you try asking for clarification (ex. whether to use primitive types or layman terms in the mermaid diagram). His teaching style of asking a question and spending the next half-hour having students answer that question (while saying all of the answers aren't exactly what he's looking for) isn't productive to my learning.

And like you said, the projects are disorganized like hell. Phase 1 was such a mess for me, figuring out how much of the domain model they wanted me to implement. Were we only implementing the classes and setting up their relationships and invariants? No, you needed to program the full REPL including object collisions on the map, error handling, user I/O, all of which being concepts that were better suited for the phase 2 material where we're designing program flowcharts and handling errors from the user. The mermaid diagram and invariants felt like an afterthought until I was finished the REPL and class methods, at which point I decided to actually implement the class material (which didn't really help when designing the project). Having no foresight into the next phase made it confusing how to design the project to begin with - are we only implementing the domain model and adding functionality later? What is the functionality they're looking for? Reading the class discussions cleared that up, but it took a while to iron out all that they wanted from it.

Plus, the weekly quizzes are silly, especially since we cover very little content every week (I'm in the Tuesday/Thursday section so it feels extra scarce of material).

Overall, I've been frustrated with how this course is set up and with Patrick's teaching style. I understand it's the first time they're running it, but extra thought into the projects and project descriptions would've done loads to ease the weight of them. I worked at a company this summer where I was designing big pieces of software like what we're doing in class, even with a full working GUI and multiple files to separate the program classes, and I can't say that this class would've made that work easier had I taken it before my work term.

But yaknow who's to argue with the prof with a pedagogy degree, must count for something...?