From: Gregory Brown <gregory.t.brown@...>
Date: 2010-06-08T13:09:02+09:00
Subject: Re: [RFC] Ruby Mendicant University

On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 5:52 PM, Josh Cheek <josh.cheek@gmail.com> wrote:

> From your page:
>
> Q: Would you want to attend this online school?
> A: Yes (assuming I'm in your target demographic, a little more information
> about who this is would be nice)

Sure, I actually had a good conversation about this with one
prospective student that I can post to my blog.   I'll try to get that
up tomorrow sometime.


> Q: What can I do to make it even more awesome?
> A: I would love to see something like codingbat.com / spoj.pl /
> codechef.com explicitly aimed at Ruby. I feel like quick immediate
> feedback is very
> helpful. Preset problems give direction and goals, and if they can be
> immediately verified, give an incentive to keep going. As I discovered while
> working on projecteuler.net, seeing little green checkmarks aggregate is
> oddly addicting, and helps to motivate me to keep going. (Note that
> stackoverflow does the same thing, but they use community approval as the
> test, and badges / reputation for green checkmarks. I'm pretty sure Joel
> Spolsky talks about why this works in his blog, but I read it a while ago
> and don't care to look it up)

I really love Project Euler, though it's probably a bit different than
what I have in mind for this project.  I could probably do at least
some exercises in this style though.  I'll keep it in mind...

> I've been trying to teach some of my friends Ruby, and my approach was to
> set up challenges for them to work on, and rake tasks to test that challenge
> against a test suite for it. If you have a safe online Ruby interpreter like
> TryRuby, as Andrew talked about, then I think that after the initial work to
> get problem sets in, then it would be in line with the idea that once you
> have it set up, it should be very little effort to maintain, yet still
> provide that interactive feel. For example, what if the problems at
> http://www.rubyproblems.com also had auto-testing a la codingbat.com, to
> verify that you did it correctly? Then you could associate with the problem,
> a test suite (http://gist.github.com/425975) load them up with the
> interpreter from TryRuby or Dia (http://github.com/robgleeson/Dia) or
> something else.

I think this is a great idea.  We will probably do something like a
set of exercises with tests provided, so that you can immediately see
if you're at least producing the expected behaviors.  Then, we could
still have a discussion about style, edge cases, and other stuff.   A
hybrid approach like this could work well...

> And now you have automated homework assignments. And you have a resource
> that is easy to provide to the entire community (ie you don't have to be in
> the school to work on the problems). And it scales: anyone can write a
> problem, and a test suite, you check them over, upload them, and there is a
> brand new problem for everyone to work on, you had to do almost no work,
> everyone signed up is eligible to work on it, it provides continued
> exercises for alumni.

I still feel pretty strongly that 1-1 and small group dynamics are
important for teaching subtle points of development.   I will produce
artifacts and attempt to run sessions that the community as a whole
can benefit from, but my main focus is still on making a big impact on
small groups at a time.

Thanks for the great suggestions.  If there is anything else that
comes to mind, just let me know.

-greg