curriculum improvements needed

[Sarah Allen]

Hi all,

I'm feeling in desperate need of improvements to the curriculum before the first Boston workshop next week.  There are an awful lot of TODOs and gaps on the wiki.

I really want to teach with cucumber since it worked really well for my total newbies last time, but I only got as far as the first few tests.  I've got a crazy work deadline which we have just extended to Saturday night (woo hoo!) and on Sunday I plan to sleep a lot, but then I will dive into improving the curriculum,  If anyone has time this weekend, I would really appreciate people willing to try running the features, implementing them and writing down what you did.  After every workshop, everyone always says that we need better materials -- now is your chance to make it happen!  We can then use the materials again in SF.

If you can help, please take a look at:  http://wiki.devchix.com/index.php?title=Workshop_Topics 

starting here:  http://wiki.devchix.com/index.php?title=Workshop_Topics#Next_feature:_topics_page

you will notice there is no content.... then when it gets here: http://wiki.devchix.com/index.php?title=Workshop_Topics#Add_votes

we veer off the new curriculum altogether and dive into test unit... which may be an okay approach (although I would likely use rspec), but there needs to be some connecting steps.

If you have questions, shout out.  If you are inspired, just start editing the wiki.

Thanks in advance,

Sarah

[Sarah Mei]

Most of the problems I ran into with cucumber (last weekend @ aloha on
rails) were technical. The network couldn't keep up with 50 people at
once running the rails template (which is when the custom features are
downloaded - even though they are only a few kb). It's solidified my
resolve to put together a proposal to buy a mac mini and set it up as
an internal gem/file server that we bring to every workshop.

How's the teaching breakdown look in Boston? If it's one big class,
it'll probably work better to have people run an updated template w/
no file download, and then copy the features directory in off a usb
key. I have 3 keys with everything on them that I can drop off, maybe
this weekend. When are you leaving?

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Sarah Mei
sarahmei.com/blog