Re: test first teaching question
Sarah Allen
I've approved your membership in the group -- sorry for the delay! I'm cc'ing the group on my reply. Most of the classes I teach are for experienced programmers who are just learning Ruby. I have taught a few groups of non-programmers and my colleague, Liah Hansen, teaches a "Learn to Program" class regularly at Blazing Cloud. She used the Chris Pine book and created at least one test-first exercise based on one from that book.
I have some more thoughts on teaching novices with this approach, but need to run off to work now. I just wanted to send a quick email to the list in case other folks are online and want to chime in.
Thank you for joining us!
Sarah
http://www.ultrasaurus.com/
http://blazingcloud.net/
On Dec 23, 2010, at 2:06 AM, Scharlau, Dr Bruce A. wrote:
> Sarah,
>
> I was looking at what you and Alex and have been doing at testfirst.org and had a few questions as I was working out how to use this with our beginning ruby/rails students. The part I'm not sure about is this: do you assume that the students have no programming experience, or do you assume some and that they're just moving to ruby? I'm assuming that you're working from the 'no programming experience' assumption, but am then left wondering what sort of things you've done to get the ball rolling as it were with things.
>
> My thoughts were to just use the 'this is how you do it' approach and to then slowly over the following weeks unpack the 'why' were doing things the way we are, and to reveal how things fit together. Still think there has to be a 'better' way to do this, and can see a glimmer of it in the video of your talk at ruby meetup in SF, and what you've been writing over time.
>
> PS can you ask whoever's in charge of the 'test-first-teaching' group on google to approve or reject my application to join? I was going to ask this all over there, but that seems to have slowed to have stopped for the holidays or something.
>
>
> cheers,
>
> Bruce
>
> Dr. Bruce Scharlau
> Dept. of Computing Science
> University of Aberdeen
> Aberdeen AB24 3UE
> 01224 272193
> http://www.csd.abdn.ac.uk/~bscharla
> mailto:b.sch...@abdn.ac.uk
>
>
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