Programming Bootcamp Lesson Development

[po0f]

Calling all programmers! We need your help developing lessons for a "programming bootcamp". This will be a community effort to help beginning programmers become proficient with the basics of programming in the language of their choice.


All the lessons that make it into the lesson series should have language-neutral solutions. (No hackish solutions please, we're trying to teach good programming practice.)
The lessons should focus on fundamental programming tasks that are essential to becoming a lean, mean, programming machine.
The lessons should not be so simple that the beginner loses interest, but not so hard that they give up.


Ideally, there will be mentors for each language to help beginners that are having problems with the lessons. This isn't an ideal world, but support for as many languages as possible should be one of the goals.

If you'd like to nominate yourself to be a mentor, great! Even if you aren't a mentor, you can still help out! We need to develop a lesson plan that will follow the guidelines outlined above. A tentative date for a lesson development session will be sometime Wednesday next week (28 March 2007). A more specific time, or even day, is the discussion for this thread.

[lnostdal]

I'm not sure I understand how this is meant to work yet, but if someone need a mentor while learning Common Lisp (http://nostdal.org/~lars/writings/about-common-lisp-getting-started-under-ubuntu/common-lisp-getting-started.xhtml) I'd be glad to help.

[pmasiar]

We need your help developing lessons for a "programming bootcamp". This will be a community effort to help beginning programmers

Community developing web pages? Smells like a wiki to me.... :-) You can get free wiki at pbwiki.com within a minute...

BTW all good ideas are taken - something like 'bootcamp' was already started here: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/School:Computer_Science Maybe it makes sense to contribute to that effort? Is there a reason why *not* to share?


... become proficient with the basics of programming in the language of their choice.
All the lessons that make it into the lesson series should have language-neutral solutions.

Of course you are free to do what you wat, but in *my opinion* is better to start programming using a simple language like Python, learn basics concepts, and after that learn syntax of other languages. "language-neutral" is not very meaningfull, target language tends to sneak in. Like when teaching Python you don't need discussion about differences between short and long integers, character and string, array and list - there isn't any. You do not need to mention OOP and classes either - you can write Python code in procedural style, until you are ready for OOP. Teaching Java, you *have to* mention these concepts, otherwise code may not compile.

So IMHO (and you may not agree) better approach, better return on community efforts, would be to teach Python as first language, and then prepare lessons for other languages assuming student is not a total beginner. C would be obvious second language - static typing, but rather simple, and close relation to assembler.

And I started http://learnpython.pbwiki.com/ to do just that.

[Wybiral]

Well, I think the point of it is language-neutral.

I think it's a great idea.

One cool thing that will come out of it is to be able to see solutions to the same problem in different languages.

[Mirrorball]

I'm willing to help with Python, PHP, and C++, but what exactly will we have to do?

[xtacocorex]

Mirrorball, I think we're supposed to think of simple/intermediate programming ideas and help new programmers out with trying to solve them by teaching them how to find answers and think outside of the box.

I'd be willing to help out from time to time; FORTRAN all the way. I also can do C++ and Python.

The nice thing about language independent is the ability for us seasoned programmers to get a feel for another language we may not have exposure too.

[dwblas]

You can start with the weekly programming challenge(s)
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/search.php?searchid=16772670