introduction and initial TFT thoughts

[Bruce Scharlau]

Hi all,

I'm Bruce Scharlau and I teach computing at the University of Aberdeen
in Scotland and have been teaching Ruby on Rails since 2006. I initially
used it with third year students, but since last year have been teaching
it as the beginning programming language for some first year students
and as the only language our MSc conversion students use. I've also now
helped push through a more complete move to Ruby and Rails for our
undergraduate and postgraduate students, which will mean that we'll have
a growing community of RoR developers in the coming years.

I've covered some of my experience with a few talks at Scotland on Rails
in 2009 and Scottish Ruby Conference in 2010. I have also been guiding
our MSc conversion students on their summer projects, which have all
been tied to Ruby and Rails for the last few years now, where they work
on real projects helping people solve problems such as building systems
for local groups to use, and contributing to projects for NGOs. We're
also hopefully getting some internship type things underway with some of
the Ruby houses down in Edinburgh, but we'll see how that goes.

Anyways, my more immediate concern is how to integrate TFT with students
who are new to programming, as Sarah pointed out in my earlier email to
her that she sent to the group. Last year when I added the 'testing'
stuff later, it meant a change of gear and was not obvious to the
students why they really should do it from the start of a project. We
use Chris Pine's book for the Ruby and I'm not sure which Rails book
we'll use this year with R3 now, but guess it'll come down to either
Ryan and Yehuda's or Sam and Dave's book.

I'm thinking that working up some TFT examples from ideas that Sarah and
Alex have put together to go along with Chris's book could be a good
starting point, but am open to suggestions and ideas of how to get this
going with complete beginners.

As we're now almost at Christmas Eve, I just wanted to get this out
there while it's still fresh in my head, so reply when you can folks,
and have a good holiday time.

--
cheers,

Bruce

Dr. Bruce Scharlau
Dept. of Computing Science
Meston Building, Room 229
University of Aberdeen
Aberdeen AB24 3UE
01224 272193
http://www.csd.abdn.ac.uk/~bscharla
mailto:b.sch...@abdn.ac.uk

[Todd Sedano]

Bruce,

I work only with master students who already know a programing language, so I'll let the group answer your main question. 

Regarding Rails 3, we've been using the Agile Web Development book, but for our next offering, I want to switch to a book that uses  test-driven-development to teach Rails. Michael Hartl's book (http://railstutorial.org/) is on my short list. If you select Rails 3 in Action, let me know. I have until summer to decide, so I'm not in a hurry.

I'll be at ICSE (and CSEET) this year as well as RailsConf (Balitmore, MD)  if you are going to either it would be fun to chat.

Regards,

Todd

Todd Sedano

Director of Software Engineering

Carnegie Mellon University

Silicon Valley Campus

Developing Software Leaders (TM)

T: 650-335-2812

todd....@sv.cmu.edu

[Alex Chaffee]

Bruce -

I originally developed the testfirst.org curriculum for use alongside Chris Pine's book, so while it doesn't track chapter by chapter, it's certainly compatible. I'm developing a JavaScript curriculum now but when I go back to teaching Ruby again I want to flesh it out and tie the exercises in more closely with the book and its examples and exercises.

That is, unless you beat me to it :-)

I encourage anyone who wants to enhance or rewrite any of the testfirst materials to fork the repo and have a go. The readme explains how to pick and choose chapters and build out a custom curriculum that gets pushed into a github repo for students to clone. And then you can contribute your work back via a git pull request.

Is video available of your talks? I'd love to watch them on my long flight tomorrow...

- A

Sent from my iPhone

[Bruce Scharlau]

Alex and Todd,

thanks for the ideas. Stuff to mull over the holidays, and then work on
before classes start end of January. I'd forgotten about Michael's book,
which is good with tests integrated from the start, and it's done as
well, which is useful for me.

The 2009 one is here
http://scotland-on-rails.s3.amazonaws.com/1B03_BruceScharlau-SOR.mp4
http://www.engineyard.com/blog/community/scotland-on-rails/ has the full
list

The 2010 one (not so pleased with it myself, didn't quite gel to my
taste) is at
http://video2010.scottishrubyconference.com/show_video/3/2
http://video2010.scottishrubyconference.com/

Both sets also include nice conference 'wrap ups' from Joe and Jim at
Edgecase, which are enjoyable too.

Safe journeys folks, and enjoy the holidays.

Bruce