Lessons Learned from Teaching Ruby on Rails 3

Aloha,

I recently taught a one day class titled Intro to Ruby on Rails 3 at the Pacific New Media school from University of Hawaii.  It was a great learning experience for me, as it was my first full day class teaching anything.

Some lessons learned:


  • I under-sold the class description, thinking it was an intro class, but in reality it was an intermediate class.  I was assuming the students knew what the Terminal was, or what a relational database is.
  • If there are basic tools required to learn the base material, spend some time explaining these basic tools, even for an intermediate class.
  • Pair programming worked about 50%.  I had the class arrange themselves in a line, from newbie to expert.  This was a great ice breaker, and I used this to group people together.  However, some people wanted to stick with their colleagues.  I saw a lot of people helping each other out and teaching each other, but not everyone is into this format.
  • There was extremely minimal lecture, and everyone appreciated it.
  • The class was very hands on, and everyone appreciated that, too.
  • I was over ambitious with the example application.  I shouldn't bother with user management at all, even though I used OpenID to minimize that problem.  Next time, skip over users.
  • The real life example app worked great.  We built an HTML5 geolocation based check-in app.
  • Ask the students to create their Heroku accounts ahead of time.  It's a quick process, but Heroku detected many accounts being created from the same IP and blocked some of the students.
  • I should have run through a final, final compliance check list.  I had elements of this, but some students missed some of the pre-req's which caused problems later.
  • I'll cater lunch next time, as there were no good options on campus and it took too long to get to the only open option.
  • I had the students sign up for Github and Heroku, but turns out explaining the benefits of Github just didn't fit into the time we had.  Next time I'll just use Heroku.
  • I wrote the whole example app ahead of time, which was invaluable.
  • We did a lot of work designing the app with class participation.  I believe this part worked.
Overall I had a great time, and I think most of the students had fun.  I'm looking forward to running the class again with the above tweaks for an even better experience.

Thanks to all who came!

Popular posts from this blog

The 29 Healthiest Foods on the Planet

The 29 Healthiest Foods on the Planet > The following is a "healthy food hot list" consisting of the 29 food that will give you the biggest nutritional bang for you caloric buck, as well as decrease your risk for deadly illnesses like cancer, diabetes and heart disease.
Read more

Lists and arrays in Dart

(This is Part 3 in a series about Dart. Check out Part 2, Function in Dart .) Warning : We expect the Dart libraries to undergo potentially sweeping changes before Dart goes to alpha. This document is relevant as of 2011-12-22. Intro Dart is a "batteries included" effort to help app developers build modern web apps. An important "battery" is the bundled core Dart libraries, providing common and rich functionality. Dart is building a solution for large, complex web apps, and providing well tested, integrated, and common libraries is key to helping a web app developer be more productive out of the box. The Collection libraries are a crucial set of APIs that Dart developers get for free. Much more than simple arrays and maps, the Collection library includes standard ways to filter, iterate, inspect, compose, and sort your data. This post specifically looks at List<E> , Dart's ordered, indexable collection of objects. Aside: The Dart project is lucky...
Read more

Converting Array to List in Scala

Now, this has to have a built-in somewhere in Scala , because it just seems too common. So, how to convert an Array to a List in Scala? Why do I need this? I needed to drop to Java for some functionality, which in this case returns an Array. I wanted to get that Array into a List to practice my functional programming skillz. **Update**: I figured out how to convert Arrays to Lists the Scala way. Turns out it's a piece of cake. val myList = List.fromArray(Array("one", "two", "three")) or val myList = Array("one","two","three").elements.toList The call to elements returns an Iterator , and from there you can convert to a List via toList . Nice. Because my first version wasn't actually tail recursive, what follows is a true tail recursive solution, if I were to implement this by hand. The above, built in mechanism is much better, though. object ArrayUtil { def toList[a](array: Array[a]): List[a] = { d...
Read more