Curriculum and Screencasts

[mreider]

Hi Aaron, and the group. Nic Williams (Dr. Nic) pointed me to your
group. I run all of training and professional services at Engine Yard.
I'd love to join the discussion. I'll also invite Jen Mei Wu, and
Sarah Allen of Blazing Cloud.

[Aaron Sumner]

Outstanding, I look forward to hearing more about how Ruby plays a role in the private sector's training/education. Thanks for passing the word along.

Aaron

[mreider]

Also, for what it's worth, I am a credentialed science teacher
(Biology) in California, and I have done a lot of classroom teaching.
So while my time is spent in the private sector, I am quite familiar
with the public education, and the uncertain craft of teaching.

[Christian Pennaforte]

Hi !

I'm Christian PENNAFORTE, from REIMS, FRANCE (so english is not my main language, I'll try to do my best !).

I'm developing web-apps with Ruby On Rails since 2008 for the main hospital of my city. I'm often helped by students who need to do internships.

Since january 2011 (it's quite recent), I also teach Ruby On Rails in classrooms to students in IUT (Technology University Institute), computer science department (they're between 17 and 20 years old). I used to teach PHP/XML, but this year I managed to have a Ruby On Rails training module opened, I'm quite proud of this :-)

What's interesting in this module is that students already know Java and PHP, Javascript, HTML and CSS. But they've never used a framework. So they can transpose their knowledge to ROR and understand more quickly how everything actually interacts.

So, it's not exactly only Ruby training, it's the whole framework. But it's pleasant to see how they discover Ruby and find it cool.

And... I'm also the proud dad of 5 kids, and I was wondering how I could get the oldests (14 and 12) interested in learning programming with Ruby. If you have ideas...

Christian PENNAFORTE

[royvandermeij]

Hello,

I'm Roy van der Meij, developer/teacher in Ruby on Rails for the past
4 years.
I teach Ruby and Rails at a local university (in Holland).

The variety of students I teach is quite big, the last class was with
students with Technical, Economic and Medical backgrounds.
For me the most interesting part was that the students who study
Medical Engineering deliver the best products, the software
engineering students try to get away with as less effort possible.
Which is really sad cause I myself went to the same school to get my
software engineering bachelor, and I can't remember I was this lazy
with programming assignments.

My course is made of self-made material, and I teach the course in 4
days (4 x 3 hours).
The first day is pure Ruby and in the other days it's all Rails,
although I have been planning to give them a simple git course at the
end to deploy to heroku.

In what period do you guys teach Rails? And do you use self-made
materials?
Maybe we can create an outstanding course together?

Cheers, Roy

ps: Christian: let them create a webapp to create tiny cheat notes,
that will get their attention :)

On Feb 3, 8:52 am, Christian Pennaforte <cpennafo...@chu-reims.fr>
wrote:

[Christian Pennaforte]

Hi again,

I teach Ruby On Rails in about 14 hours to 26 students.
- 1 hour is a lecture (students trying to be attentive),
- 1 1/2 hours is a seminar, 2 students on each computer, coding a small project (not sure I translate well what I mean).

During the first lecture, I started with a quick demo (generating a simple app in 6 commands) to open their appetite, and then introduced them to Ruby and Rails, which was a very heavy subject. At the end, I did the same demo again, to show them what they learned.

Then they started the seminar, starting a fresh project I will share with you if there's a place to upload some files.
They will go on this project adding more functionalities (paging, sorting, filtering, ajax, acts_as_mappable, import xml files, using jQuery...).

During each lecture, I'll try to de a quick slideshow and then a live demo, to explain what goes where.

My goal is :
- make them feel everything they've learned before can be useful to understand something new
- make them love Ruby On Rails ;-)

For my kids, I've just discovered http://ruby4kids.com... There's a bit of translation to do for them, but I'll have a look. Thank you Roy for you suggestion :-)

Best regards,
--
Christian

Christian PENNAFORTE
Tél. : +33 3 26 83 28 12

[Karmen Blake]

Starting in 2006, I taught Ruby and Rails at Spokane Community College in Spokane, Washington. (http://cis.scc.spokane.edu/?cissoftdevcourses, http://cis.scc.spokane.edu/?cissoftdev)

I taught a sequence: Beginning Ruby, Advanced Ruby, and Ruby on Rails. I am a full-time developer now but still am on the advisory board for the software dev. program. They still teach Ruby and Rails there successfully.

I have some (outdated) Ruby and Rails screen-casts online at: http://www.viddler.com/explore/kblake/videos/

I have tons of Ruby examples from my lectures too: https://github.com/kblake/learning-ruby

Feel free to use what you want. :)

Karmen

[mreider]

Nice to meet everyone. At Engine Yard, we teamed with Blazing Cloud to
write our curriculum, which is a 4 day class. It is our Intellectual
Property, but there are parts of it that are open source (MIT License)
as well. We are a very reasonable company in terms of sharing the
investments we make, and we devote a lot of financial capital towards
Open Source (we host the JRuby team, the Rubinius team, and we
provided 2 core Rails contributors for the Rails 3 launch).

I would love to turn our curriculum loose to the group. I will talk
about it internally.