General
Gems
- Seeing Is Believing
- Surrogate
- Mountain Berry Fields
- Deject
- Pbcopy
- LetterPress Is Not As Good As Boggle
- Haiti
Web Based
Ruby Kickstart
free course with videos, quizzes, and challenges
Ruby Kickstart is one of the ways in I address things I see as issues with education. I created six sessions of material to teach Ruby from the basics up through a simple Sinatra application for Heroku. I went through this material with my friends and recorded the sessions. They are up at ruby-kickstart.com for anyone to view.
There are quizzes on the website to emphasize important points.
The curriculum that we go through in class can be downloaded, and each session has an associated set of challenges. The student completes the challenges and checks them against a suite of RSpec tests to get immediate feedback on whether they've completed the challenge successfully.
Since summer 2010, I've gone through it three times, graduating a total of ten people.
The first group also decided to do a project in Sinatra to give them a way to really solidify the knowledge. The project was a site to manage the library for our school's CS Department.
I found this to be rewarding, as it allowed us to collaborate, and got them excited about Ruby. One of them has helped me work on RKS itself, the other did his graduate project in Rails, and is taking a Rails job at Partnerpedia in July 2011.
Ruby Kickstart is also the source of my first fork that I didn't solicit from my friends 