I love this discussion. I've long been an advocate of Ruby for teaching. I promoted using Ruby to lecturers at the ANU about 12 years ago. I gave a lecture on Ruby at a course about Python at UNSW. I have trained people on Ruby in a corporate setting. Julio reckons I taught him Ruby, but he's just being nice and flattering me. I love the idea of using Ruby to teach procedural and object oriented programming principles, along with the other languages programmers should learn.
At my previous employer, we sat around discussing what the best way to train somebody to be a good web developer would be. University wasn't our answer but neither was diving into industry experience. I admit that we had no good answer. I would love to contribute in some way to solving that dilemma. It's sort of on my career goal on my resume. The best answer I have for that question is to think of ourselves like chefs who benefit from studying in several Ruby kitchens and combining that experience. I really enjoyed the code retreat exercises I did with Andrew, Scott, Josh, Tim and others (forgive me) at USyd a while ago (writing the game of life) and I think that kind of thing is the bees knees for teaching: a practical classroom environment where the culture is one of skill sharing and practice, and nobody is afraid of getting fired or failing an exam or jeopardising their employability for asking stupid questions, and there's no heckling. I've seen people give presos at rorosyd and I've seen their hands visibly shake. I've been to rorosyds and seen nothing but the backs of tall men. It makes me question whether it's the best teaching and learning environment. If anybody here does or would like to teach and learn Ruby and web development in a "study group" classroom setting, shoot me an email. I dig it. Laptops, classrooms (maybe at USyd?), Corey Haines style perfect practice, and maybe we'll build something as a project and draft a syllabus for the universities, if we feel like it. -Greg -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby or Rails Oceania" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rails-oceania?hl=en.
