Alternative curriculum for beginners - built in REPL, no turtles

[John Stevenson]

Hello ClojureBridge,

We created an alternative curriculum to the slides based approach which drops the turtle related content.  We have added more examples and reduced some of the theory to focus attendees on trying out Clojure.   The alternative curriculum includes a ClojureScript REPL so students can code without having to install a specific editor or IDE.

https://clojurebridgelondon.github.io/workshop/

# No more turtles

After running 5 events we decided to drop the Turtles section and all references to it.  Although it was useful to have something visual to work with, the actuall quil code was the cause of consistent feedback that it was too confusing (even for some of the coaches).

# Klipse REPL inside

We use the Klipse REPL for examples and exercises, allowing an easy way to try out Clojure code.  The students that are just beginning coding are the main users of this REPL.  Some students who have already starting their first coding language use their own editor / IDE instead.

# Not specific editor/IDE

We no longer mandate a specific IDE or editor.  LightTable used to be the tool we installed on the Friday evening, however, it is no longer actively maintained.  For those students continuing to develop their Clojure skills after the event, it was found that LightTable was quickly replaced by their favourite editor.

There is so much choice now in editors for Clojure, it is much better for students to use what they know if they have already started coding.  So on the Friday evening we offer to set up any preferred tool, typically Atom&Protorepl, Spacemac, Cursive, VSCode&Calva, Repl.it or LIghtTable.

For those who have never coded (and not sure how much they want to) we suggest they use the Klipse REPL and they can save any workings by copying into any editor they wish (or even a document, eg. google docs). 

Not having a mandated Clojure environment has freed up a lot of discussion in the group and we could focus on improving the experience for the students (and in return the coaches) by improving the practicallity of the curriculum.

We are always looking for improvements to our content, especially in terms of examples.  All the content is written in Markdown and the page is generated by the open source version of gitbook.io.

Thank you

John.

[Nola Stowe]

sounds like a great plan :) 

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