Class Progress | 313Dev

11 week Detroit @313Dev project teaches Ruby, Rails, Git, Unix, TDD, & pairing to youth from underserved communities

This afternoon, we had our first class with a group comprised of seven High School students: 3 girls, 4 boys from various schools in the Ypsilanti, MI area. The class was held on the campus of Eastern Michigan University. I had set up some Ubuntu laptops (kindly provided by Pillar & BillHighway ) ahead of time with Git+RVM+Ruby and a few other goodies. We kicked off with some introductions, and then jumped right in to using the Terminal. These students had never seen Unix let alone programming of any kind, so I could sense some apprehension in the air. We started off by making, deleting and navigating some directories. After that, we git cloned the Ruby Koans just in time for our internet connection to die. Next, I told them that although they would be extremely frustrated, they would be happy in the long run… so we started working on the Koans via Vim . It was interesting...

Full article: http://313dev.com/category/class-progress/