Ruby Mendicant University [Ruby]

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From: andrew mcelroy on 4 Jun 2010 16:07

From: Josh Cheek on 4 Jun 2010 17:52

[Note: parts of this message were removed to make it a legal post.]

On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 3:25 PM, Gregory Brown <gregory.t.brown(a)gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> Just letting you know about my latest project idea. I am looking to
> start up a free online Ruby school.
> You can find the details at:
>
> http://blog.rubybestpractices.com/posts/gregory/025-ruby-mendicant-university.html
>
> I need some help getting the initial costs covered, so if you'd like
> to donate, please go ahead!
> http://pledgie.com/campaigns/11063
>
> Please feel free to ask questions on the blog or here. Like the
> original Ruby Mendicant project, I will need lots of feedback from the
> community to get this one right!
>
> -greg
>
>
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)

Q: Would you be willing to donate to help with its creation?
A: Yes

Q: Would you recommend this program to others?
A: If I thought they would benefit from it.

Q: What can I do to make it even more awesome?
A: I would love to see something like codingbat.com / spoj.pl /
codechef.comexplicitly 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'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.

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.

Just thoughts, but it's something I've been wanting to see for a very long
time, and will end up implementing myself at some point when I know enough
to do it, if there isn't already something better.

Thanks, and I look forward to hearing more about this project.

From: Gregory Brown on 8 Jun 2010 00:04

On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 4:07 PM, andrew mcelroy <sophrinix(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 3:25 PM, Gregory Brown <gregory.t.brown(a)gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Hi folks,
>>
>> Just letting you know about my latest project idea. I am looking to
>> start up a free online Ruby school.

> We should chat off list. A large portion of this aim is what I have in mind
> with TryRuby.org .
> I have been busy launching a non profit an other non programming related
> efforts.

I'm at RailsConf right now, and not really keeping up on email. If
you happen to be here, definitely catch up with me and we can chat.
Otherwise, shoot me an email at this address in a few days and I'll be
happy to discuss whatever is on your mind.

From: Gregory Brown on 8 Jun 2010 00:09

On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 5:52 PM, Josh Cheek <josh.cheek(a)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

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