Reasons
LAMP stack was my workhorse for about 2-3 years, but I had a strong feeling that I need to move forward and switch to long-loved Ruby language (and Rails framework). But as usual I was busy with the current projects and lacked some healthy pressure, regularity and discipline.
Previously I had experience in educating others in computer science in groups, but forcing myself to switch to new technology stack was quite challenging.
Crowd learning or peer-to-peer learning idea came to my mind quickly, as it was simple, affordable (free) and fun. So I've published the post about this on one the national developers forum and got mostly positive (sic!, not skeptical) feedback and almost 40+ students got to the list easily.
Peer-to-peer learning
There are some paradigms in studying technologies/programming which can be nicely combined in our case:
- Peer-to-peer learning
- Learning by doing
- Mentorship
- Self-education, MOOCS etc.
- One-feature-micro-app methodology, nicely presented by Justin Weiss in his book.
- Pair programming
Audience
My target audience was anyone who wants study Ruby and Ruby-on-Rails from zero. Surprisingly there were some Java, PHP guys who wanted to widen their tech horizon or switch to a new stack. Also there were junior rubyists who helped others a lot.
Tools
As a communication platform we started using Google Groups first, but later switched to Slack.
For conference calls we used Google hangouts with helpful feature of recording screen sharingvsessions to YouTube.
Sometimes we used Cloud9 online IDE to code and share project online.
Obviously, Github was used for version control.
Outcomes
Well, was it worth the efforts? Yep.
I gained some soft skills of organizing everything, making curriculum, studying new tools, networking and communication skills, vision of the growing process from zero to junior developer.
Do I want to improve something? Sure thing.
I want to make it more fun and invite mentors to review the code of the students. Connect students with companies which want internship program, or contributing to beginner-friendly opensource projects.
I've found DEV community open-minded and friendly that's why I decided to share my story here.
What do you think of that? Would you like to participate?
Cheers 😜 💎
Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash
Top comments (7)
Hey Ark,
This sounds really cool! Is this peer-to-peer learning experience of Ruby still going on? If so, what kind of projects have y'all got planned to do together? I'm curious about the specifics of what you might have already done or are planning to do to learn and stay motivated together as group.
Hey, Michael,
That peer-to-peer learning took place 4 years ago, when I have started my rubyist career path. So currently this thing is on hold.
As I got some experience and have lessons learnt, I'd like to continue such kind of learning with some friendly community.
This was very simple stuff, we learned basics of Ruby and Rails, no specific project was given, because of my immaturity at that moment.
Motivation was very simple, in the group we decided that everybody should prepare her/his topic and explain to everybody. Thus, anyone can be a teacher and a student in the same group.
Nice! Teaching is definitely a great way to learn... forces you to research and organize your thoughts around a topic. If you've got to explain it to others, then of course you want to do your best to know it well. Anyway, cool post on peer-to-peer learning!
Yep, that's the point. Thanks 😀
How did you find the people you worked with? How did you manage the difference between people new to coding and experience coders? I really like this idea, I'm wondering as a newbie coder how I could do something like this.
First, I've published my idea on famous national developers site with a link to google forms page (for registration). We took classic Matz's 'Ruby in a Nutshell' book, divided topics among participants and scheduled our meetings one a week at 8pm.
More experienced guys took more difficult topics to explain, less experienced took easier topics from the book. We had screensharing so everybody could see how things works (like Avdi's Ruby Tapas).
That is very cool. Thanks for sharing.