Dober dan gospodine, A few years ago I taught two semesters of web application programming to undergraduates using Ruby on Rails. None of them had any experience with either programming in Ruby or developing for the web before we started, but by most accounts it was a success. Maybe some of what we learned can help you...
We structured the class as if we were all working on an open source project together. We setup a Subversion repository and a mailing list, and asked everyone to brainstorm project ideas during the first few weeks of the course while they were learning the basics of Ruby through a series of short programming exercises. Eventually every student submitted an idea or two, and they all voted to create a wiki like system that supported multi-media in a nice way. From there on, we operated in two week cycles. At the beginning of each cycle we would have a class discussion about what features to work on, which bugs to fix, how to design important parts of the system, etc. Everyone had to choose something they wanted to work on, submit a short description of what they would do and how they plan on doing it, and then do it. Communication on the mailing list started slow. People were nervous about embarrassing themselves in front of their classmates, and everyone was just starting in Ruby. The first commits to the source tree were also pretty small and quite often very buggy. Every time a student came to us with questions we would ask them to first post it to the list though, and every time someone found a bug we asked them to post it so we can put it on the TODO list for next cycle. For the first 5-6 weeks of the project we spent most of the lectures going through code together, teaching more detailed lectures on web app architecture, routing HTTP requests, model-view-controller, object relational mapping, view templates, a little about javascript, etc. Every lecture started with a clarification section though. Typically about 10 minutes covering concepts that we could tell people were struggling with by looking at their patches each week. Eventually it really took off. Traffic on the mailing list literally doubled every couple weeks from the start to the finish of the semester, and submissions to the source tree kept getting more interesting and more effective. There were plenty of bumps in the road, social problems between competing interests, and all the other student/open-source debates that come up, but that was also part of the reason for doing the course the way we did it. By the end of the semester they had a working application with lots of cool functionality to demo to the rest of the faculty, and not only did the students seem more confident in terms of picking up a new language and a new technology, but they were also comfortable joining mailing lists and taking part in the greater software development community. My advice would be to have a lecture plan for every week, whether you get to it or not. Students feel it when the course lacks structure, and in turn they will lose motivation and discipline also. Try to setup some policies in the beginning in terms of how assignments work, when things are due, and what kind of code you expect, and then stick with it. I guess this is kind of generic advice, but especially in a class that feels less traditional I think it's even more important to have this kind of stability for the students. It was definitely the more challenging part of teaching for us, but when we succeeded it was obvious. Good luck! -Jeff P.S. The great thing about the internet and the software world is that it doesn't really matter where you are. If your students learn the right skills and practice lots I think they have a good chance of finding work remotely or creating sites/services that can be used by the rest of the world. Don't let a limited local economy limit their ambitions. > Hi, > > This semester I'm teaching a course at MSc studies, and I decided to > base it on Clojure. Sorry, It's not a sign that Clojure gets the > ground in USA - I'm in South-Eastern Europe, at University of Belgrade > (cca 90.000 students altogether, the largest university in the region, > but underdeveloped economy comparing to EU). > The course title is not that important, as I am free to organize it as > I like (for the curious, it's "Tools and Methods of Software > Engineering"). > > In this region, Lisp is non-existent in the industry, which is usually > based on Java, Oracle stack or Microsoft stack, plus the usual PHP in > smaller projects and with the hobbyist crowd. > The undergraduate courses are based on Java and in a smaller extent > C#, so it's a usual "traditional" programming mindset. > The faculty I'm teaching at is an exotic mixture of management / > information systems departments, so even inf. syst. students attend > more management-related than IS-related courses. So, not many typical > geeks are going to be in the crowd. This course is a part of Software > Engineering module that does not exist at undergraduate level, only > Master/PhD. I expect 30 students total, 10 active and interested, 10 > in the middle, and 10 that just want to pass. > > I'm going to use Stuart's book as a referent literature, but the > courses I teach are usually interactive and not that structured > because I want to engage students to start coding and exploring as > soon as possible and I am willing to go to whatever direction seems > interesting to them and me. There is a method to the madness, > though :) > The goal of the course is to show them alternative/emerging languages > for the JVM. Because the industry is strongly traditional, and there > is little startup opportunity (keep in mind that this is not USA) I do > not expect anything more than them to be able to be ready to adopt one > of such languages if needed at one point of time in the future. > > I hope that I'll also be able to do some research. The issue that is > particularly interesting to me to explore is how alien Clojure is to > Java programmers, what are subjective and objective causes, and how > hard is to overcome each of the identified issues. I am pretty sure my > students had no previous contact with Lisp dialects, some of them > probably coded PHP, and there may even be someone who had some contact > with Erlang/Ruby etc. I personally learned programming with Java, and > Clojure was my first contact with Lisp. Common Lisp is still something > that I would not use but Clojure was pretty easy to familiarize with, > and looks to me as JavaLisp :) > > Any suggestion, especially related to the research part, would be > helpful :)
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