The adventures of teaching computing science to university students
If learning something to professional level takes 10,000 hours, then it’s probably important to make time to practice the skills needed for that profession. It’s up to us as educators to facilitate practice experiences, which help our students do this. To that end, I’ve decided to do one less lecture each week for my course
I’ve been working on a live project recently and found it necessary to see what was happening on the Heroku version as it was running differently from my development machine. Saying ‘it works on my machine’ doesn’t help the people trying to use the site, so I had to delve deeper and work out a
These notes were used on a Windows 7 machine to create an Ubuntu Server and started with the notes created by http://notesofgreg.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/slim-rails-environment-v2.html who started this after discovering my Vagrant notes didn’t quite get him where he wanted to be with Ruby and Rails development. I started with those and then added more parts as I
Vagrant for classroom inspired by http://www.slideshare.net/ctrabold/2011-1029-ctraboldrailscamphh https://twitter.com/ctrabold at the 2011 Hamburg Railscamp http://railscamp-hamburg.de/ which I saw from the twittersteam of the event. The goal of the project is to setup Vagrant to launch a linux VM that will run Ruby 1.9.2 and Rails 3 for use by students without the attendant issues that accompany them
In the runup and following the Ruby Conf in New Orleans this year the Sarah Allen kindly pulled together the latest and greatest guides and setup tutorials. This led to a few other posts and links, which I’ve now pulled together here so that I have an easy way to find them, and to point
I have now finished teaching ruby to beginning programmers in a mixed class of postgrads and first years students. All in all it went ok. However, there are some things that I will do differently next year. Using small jumps each week seemed to go ok. I used lots of images on the slides and
The last week has seen a flurry of activity in the Ruby and Rails world where there is a buzz about geting newbies up and running easily. Some of these are new ones, while others have been around for a little while but as I’ve not come across them before I wanted to make sure
Getting ready for Scotland on Rails in Edinburgh from Thursday to Saturday. I’m giving a presentation on Friday about teaching Rails. Ran it by the person currently teaching the MSc conversion students Ruby, and he thought it fine, and mentioned that he was real pleased with how it’s been going. The students are learning lots,
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