From: Ben Giddings <bg-rubytalk@...>
Date: 2005-06-04T07:09:17+09:00
Subject: Re: Teaching Ruby

On Friday 03 June 2005 17:02, Joe Van Dyk wrote:
> Any ideas on how to do it?

No particular advice, but some general advice:

"Teaching" works best when you're not actually "teaching", but enabling 
people to learn.  You're there to help, not to lecture.

Learning works best when the people doing the learning have a goal, and a 
motivation, and that goal/motivation should *not* be "to learn Ruby" but 
instead something like "to interface to that kludgy 
library/backend/database we hate".  The goal of the exercise would be to 
do the interface, but the language in which it's done would be Ruby.

So I'd say the best approach is to choose a problem that you and your group 
regularly deal with, and figure out a way to use Ruby to solve it.  Learn 
enough about the technologies and libraries needed so that you can answer 
questions about how to do things, but let them do most of the coding and 
"figuring", you'll just be the language expert when they have trouble 
translating a concept into Ruby code.

Aside from simply being a good way to learn, if you actually get a working 
application in Ruby that solves an ongoing headache, or makes things run a 
little smoother for people, they'll have a nice fuzzy feeling about Ruby 
because it is part of the solution.

If you happen to end up with an application / presentation / concept that 
would be useful for other people trying to promote Ruby, please do share.

Ben