If you're teaching Ruby, I'd definitely try to mostly stick to the things that environment makes pretty straightforward, like serving HTML views, as opposed to the Ruby + JS framework. Mostly because I think the most important thing is to keep the students enthusiastic and feeling like they can make progress. If they can stay confident and enthusiastic, they'll conquer the more complex things down the road.
I like the idea of the web scraper because you can kind of say something like "This is basically what Google does to crawl the web, just at a much bigger scale", I feel like if they felt like they were accomplishing something like that, it would be encouraging.
Building an app similar to something they're familiar with could also be encouraging. I'd say an Instagram clone is a pretty good target in that arena.
If you had those two possible directions and let the class vote on which one at the beginning, or split into two groups, that could be a fun way to get them feeling agency over the project right from the beginning.
Instagram is essentially a pretty simple blog if you're cloning it on the web. But I think it speaks to kids a lot more, and is something you can definitely do with pure Ruby.
Along the way, make sure to let the kids know that the web and native app development are pretty interchangeable and if they want to go further they can learn the specifics of developing for the phone if they wanted to in the future.
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If you're teaching Ruby, I'd definitely try to mostly stick to the things that environment makes pretty straightforward, like serving HTML views, as opposed to the Ruby + JS framework. Mostly because I think the most important thing is to keep the students enthusiastic and feeling like they can make progress. If they can stay confident and enthusiastic, they'll conquer the more complex things down the road.
I like the idea of the web scraper because you can kind of say something like "This is basically what Google does to crawl the web, just at a much bigger scale", I feel like if they felt like they were accomplishing something like that, it would be encouraging.
Building an app similar to something they're familiar with could also be encouraging. I'd say an Instagram clone is a pretty good target in that arena.
If you had those two possible directions and let the class vote on which one at the beginning, or split into two groups, that could be a fun way to get them feeling agency over the project right from the beginning.
Yeah, I don't think I'll be touching any JS frameworks right away (maybe a follow up, more advanced class?) for the sake of simplicity.
Also, I hadn't thought of cloning an existing app, sounds totally more exciting than a blog+comments project. More creative, also.
Thank you!
Instagram is essentially a pretty simple blog if you're cloning it on the web. But I think it speaks to kids a lot more, and is something you can definitely do with pure Ruby.
Along the way, make sure to let the kids know that the web and native app development are pretty interchangeable and if they want to go further they can learn the specifics of developing for the phone if they wanted to in the future.