Teaching Ruby to High School Girls
teachingkids.railsbridge.org
Teaching Ruby to High School Girls
1–10 of 48 posts
Re: Teaching Ruby to High School Girls
#2I am surprised how well that went down to be honest - they must have been some bright kids!
I don't think you'd have as much luck with first year uni students in a three hour segment.
Great work and I love the extension ideas (including USB drives!)
Re: Teaching Ruby to High School Girls
#3I'm amazed as well that it went that well.
And its really great to hear that they weren't put off, lets hope the coming generation can help improve the genre ratio within programming workplaces.
I like you approach, and choosing shoes probably was a good choice. Instant gratification should be #1 goal in classes like this, its all about building excitement, which it seems you nailed.
"Another girl dug into the documentation she had seen me use, and figured out how to use the color picker to let the user select a color for the line!" I'm impressed. Figuring out manuals can at times be hard even for us who use them on a day-to-day basis.
Re: Teaching Ruby to High School Girls
#4Here's a crazy idea. Let's teach Ruby in intro programming classes instead of C, so as not to frighten away 90% of the population with pointer dereferencing and segfaults. You should teach C eventually to make them appreciate high level languages, but just not right away.
Re: Teaching Ruby to High School Girls
#5Totally awesome. It's so cool to hear such great success stories about teaching programming, especially to those who are unlikely to take it up otherwise. I wish I could upvote this 100 times.
Re: Teaching Ruby to High School Girls
#6Instead of just having the program files on USB memory stick could you have a had a custom bootable linux environment instead - then getting the environment set up would just be a case of plugging in to a PC and booting up. Sometimes getting to the point where you start programming can be hard.
Just a thought.
Re: Teaching Ruby to High School Girls
#7Here's a crazy idea. Let's teach Ruby in intro programming classes instead of C, so as not to frighten away 90% of the population with pointer dereferencing and segfaults. You should teach C eventually to make them appreciate high level languages, but just not right away.
A few institutions teach e.g. Python, Scheme or Haskell as a first language. I agree C is a horrible first language.
Re: Teaching Ruby to High School Girls
#8Instead of just having the program files on USB memory stick could you have a had a custom bootable linux environment instead - then getting the environment set up would just be a case of plugging in to a PC and booting up. Sometimes getting to the point where you start programming can be hard. Just a thought.
I'd say it's one of the biggest barriers to entry out there. Getting a dev environment set up for anything other than hacking a Wordpress template is non-trivial for most.
I use the stuff at PortableApps.com quite often with consulting clients who need Firefox/Audacity/Gimp in a hurry. Could there be a portable Ruby/Python/Django dev setup that could get a novice going quickly without having to install a bunch of files?
Re: Teaching Ruby to High School Girls
#9Instead of just having the program files on USB memory stick could you have a had a custom bootable linux environment instead - then getting the environment set up would just be a case of plugging in to a PC and booting up. Sometimes getting to the point where you start programming can be hard. Just a thought.
I'd say it's one of the biggest barriers to entry out there. Getting a dev environment set up for anything other than hacking a Wordpress template is non-trivial for most. I use the stuff at PortableApps.com quite often with consulting clients who need Firefox/Audacity/Gimp in a hurry. Could there be a portable Ruby/Python/Django dev setup that could get a novice going quickly without having to install a bunch of fil…
Re: Teaching Ruby to High School Girls
#10Here's a crazy idea. Let's teach Ruby in intro programming classes instead of C, so as not to frighten away 90% of the population with pointer dereferencing and segfaults. You should teach C eventually to make them appreciate high level languages, but just not right away.
C would be great compared to C++, which my high school and my wife's non-CS engineering department taught as intro languages.