Sugar Free Ruby An Experiment in Object first Teaching
From Gogaruco 2012
Presenter: Steven Ragnarok
During the school year, Steven! is a student of computer science, mathematics, and latte art, and this past summer he interned at GitHub. Year-round he's a passionate Ruby hacker who loves contributing to open source projects like Faraday, Rubinius and Archlinux. He teaches and contributes to KidsRuby, CoderDojo, and Rails Girls and is also on the core team for RailsBridge. He has spent more than a few evenings scrabbling to get out of the Bronze League in StarCraft II. Most importantly, Steven! is a dedicated engineer with a passion for creating beautiful things.
Ruby has a lot of syntax to come to terms with. In an effort to reduce learning overhead we often restrict what we teach by avoiding serious coverage of objects in early lessons. Yet objects are what make Ruby great. Rather than sacrifice Object Oriented Mechanics, Sugar-free ruby uses a minimum of syntactic sugar to reinforce the message-passing objective semantics of Ruby until the pupil understands and then can assimilate new syntactic elements with greater ease. This talk explores the advantages and pitfalls of the technique as well as other ways to teach Ruby.
- Teaching programming is really, really hard.
- Programming tkes a lot of self-reflection to teach well.
- It's getting better: Hungry Academy, Rails Bridge, etc.
- CoderDojo: Kids programming clubs
- Game Builder, Scratch, Python, Hackety-Hack / Shoes
- Most important lesson: Programming is Fun
- RailsBridge: Workshops for Women
- Trying to install "Programming is Hard, but it's attainable"
- Teaching Ruby: the challenge is finding out why your students want to learn ruby.
- Teaching Ruby the good old fashioned way
- Start with data types: integers, floats, strings, symbols, booleans arrays, hashes, variable assignment, conditionals, loops, etc.
- Maybe if there's time, get to methods.
- What's wrong with this: 6 concepts come before methods. No mention whatsoever of objects or classes.
- "Ruby is not a computer language" -- it doesn't care about that it runs on a computer.
- Let's teach objects and treat ruby as the computer.
- IRB is the best tool for learning ruby.
- How Steven teaches:
- Everything is an object
- They receive messages -- use
sendto show this. - Objects have a class
- Instantiation with new; variable assignemtn as "giving an object a name"
- Method definition
- Introduce dot-syntax for calling methods.
- Errors are your Friends -- try calling undefined methods
- Use
Kernel.putsas it is less "magical" than just "puts" - Define an accessor method, use an instance variable
- Implicit receivers
- Use conditionals to accomplish a goal.
- Demonstrate creating a class with
Class.new - This is focused on teaching objects with ruby.
- This is better because the object metaphor provides a context for everything else we learn about Ruby.
https://speakerdeck.com/u/nuclearsandwich/p/sugar-free-ruby
Sugar-free emphasizes Ruby is Objects
If we don't teach it, its going away
You owe it to your teachers to continue the tradition
Teaching programming is very hard!!
- Its really hard to learn to program
- Your assumptions aren't natural
- Takes a lot of empathy
- Its hard to share something valuable
- We always want to gain value out of an interaction
- You will be rewarded for your knowledge and sharing!
It takes a lot of self reflection to teach well
Just like getting better at programming, you must always be a student
Dedicated to setting up kids coding projects
In small groups, children learn to program
Kids learn that Programming Is Fun!
- Encourages children to continue to program
- Its best way to engage kids, is to make an activity fun
For anyone in this world, programming is hard but attainable
Focus on fun parts like Rails instead of installing language and dependencies
You have to know why the student is trying to learn You have to ask, "Why do you want to learn Ruby?"
- I hate my job and programmers make bank
- I know how to program but not Ruby, the Ruby community is awesome!
- I'm curious about programming
- Data types
- True and false
- Collection structures
- Expressions
- Console
- Variables
- Conditionals
- Loops
- If we are lucky, we might talk about
foo.upcaseaka objects
Where are students' minds blown? Information overload.
Whats wrong with this picture? Too many concepts before discussing methods or even mentioning classes.
Ruby is not a computer a language!
Ruby doesn't care its on a computer.
Reservation: students head will explode, but it already does with first way to teach via data types through loops.
Give the students an idea of Objects and let them explore via irb
Use #send to emphasize message passing
Be explicit to really reveal the fact that messages are being passed
Objects and classes are one in the same!
Gives student a thread to follow
Object.new
- A message called new
- Can be sent to any class
- Gives you back and instance of that class
- We give a name to the object
Helps student link in their minds exactly what is happening!
Kernal.puts is better than puts since mixins are too complicated for now
Keep the student on the narrative instead of going down a tangent
Objects have methods which accept and send messages
Introduce Classes except Class is a Class which creates new Classes
Teach objects with Ruby instead of teach Ruby with objects
Better foundation because Ruby cares about Objects and how they interact
Details on better foundation:
