Should we even write a curriculum?

[jaredmoody]

I'm not sure if GH Issues is the best place to discuss or not, but I wanted to get some conversation started.

I'm not questioning the need for education here - I'm just at least skeptical of my own ability to write a good curriculum. I know how to program, but knowing and teaching are fundamentally different skills as far as I understand. So, so I'm hesitant to put a lot of effort into a domain that I have no experience in.

Also, there are many resources out there already that I know of - perhaps building onto, adapting, refining or outright stealing (in the legal, friendly sense) someone else's well thought through, refined over time curriculum would be a good option.

Resources I know of off the top of my head that might be useful:

• freecodecamp.com (not ruby but I've heard good things)
• theodinproject.com (has a RoR track)
• pine.fm/LearnToProgram (tutorial w/ companion ruby book)
• exercism.io (not a cerriculum, but has exercises for a lot of the Chris Pine material)

Thoughts?

[JakeKaad]

I think you bring up a good point.

I think the premise for this repository, is to have an open source boot camp curriculum that programming bootcamps can adapt and implement in their programs. The resources you listed aren't exactly that, from what I can tell. I think they make great supplements to a bootcamp curriculum and maybe even great stand ins.

From my experience (I went through an online bootcamp, attended Epicodus, and also taught briefly at Epicodus), the best lessons at boot camps are the ones that are pure reverse-classroom lessons, where the lesson is thoroughly explained as a part of your homework and the classroom time the next day is spent applying that knowledge with teachers there to support you.

I also hear you that maybe, as programmers, we aren't best qualified to write curriculum like this, but a lot of us programmers that were bootcamp students are former professionals in other fields. Some of us were even teachers. I think that as a community we could make this happen.

[jaredmoody]

Sweet, that's great that you have experience on both sides of it - being a student and teaching!

Maybe we should create a "how you can help" document or something for people with various levels of comfort with things that are needed.

Also, the Odin Project ruby track is entirely open source:

https://github.com/TheOdinProject/learn_ruby

and it looks like it's forked from here:

https://github.com/alexch/learn_ruby

Maybe one of those would be a good place to build off of.

[JakeKaad]

I think that is a good idea. I think the Odin camp is an amazing resource. It might even work as a Ruby bootcamp curriculum as is. I am not sure because I never used it. Maybe we could aim for something that uses the Odin Project as the "textbook" but supplments it with lessons that would work in a bootcamp setting.

[thejonanshow]

Maybe this ends up just being a place where we can get an opinionated set of resources together to guide someone from non-dev to capable Rubyist.

[lazyplatypus]

I think what we can do is create a few complex, multi-stepped real-world projects that allow developers to learn/reinforce their skills.

Something I've want to do is create Github Learning Labs for Ruby, allowing folks to interactively learn the content by working in one's own copy of a real project.

For example, This Tutorial really helped me understand how the various steps in development worked together, from testing in Postman to writing the server code.