Teaching Rails at University of Wrocław

Between October 2010 and February 2011 I had the pleasure to teach Ruby on Rails at the University of Wrocław (Poland).

The course was 30 hours of lectures and 30 hours of labs - 15 weeks, 4 hours every Wednesday. There were about 30 students. The University of Wrocław is known of its quality and when I met the students I wasn't disappointed.

My goal for this course was to prepare the students to working with Rails. The second goal was to teach them how it is to work on a Rails project within a team in a company. I also managed to sneak some agile techniques (testing, refactoring, continuous deployment) into the program.

Every exercise required the result as a repo on Github and as a working app at Heroku. Many thanks to Github for giving us free private repos! Thanks to Heroku just for being awesome for this kind of needs.

Here is the list of lessons and exercises:

Exercise 1

Hello world app on github and heroku.

Exercise 2

2-models UI (articles + comments), has_many

Exercise 3

validations, deleting, editing the article, partials, callbacks, belongs_to

Exercise 4

Authentication, devise, authlogic

Exercise 5

searching, pagination, model specs, controller specs

Exercise 6

integration tests, capybara, more rspecs

Exercise 7

Groups app, inviting, declining, memberships
Big project - first release

Exercise 8

e-commerce app
admin can add products, cart, order confirmation
Big project - second release

Exercise 9

jQuery with Rails

Exercise 10

Facebook application
Big project - third release

Exercise 11

Rails engine (with Rails 3.1)

Big project

As you see, additionally to the exercises I required a Big Project from each student. There were many interesting projects - e-commerce app, surveys app, a really nice app for teaching Japanese, a tool which supports work of a non-profit organization, radio website, tenis tournament website and many other cool apps.

The result


I'm really happy with the result of this course. It was a great feeling watching the final presentation of a cool app being shown by a person who wrote the first Ruby line of code at my course. The level was very high and I learnt a lot from these young people. Some of the students got quickly hired by Wroclaw companies after the end of the course so this goal was at least partially achieved.

Wrocław and Ruby


BTW, Wroclaw is really strong when it comes to Ruby. Apart from my company (Arkency) there are many other awesome teams. We have regular monthly meetups (DRUGs) with more and more people every time. Additionally to the meetups we organize monthly hackathons where we work together on gems like exceptioner and bbq (yep, the famous replacement for Cucumber).

Thanks

Firstly, thanks to dr Ewa Gurbiel who not only encouraged me to run this course but who is also responsible for me being interested in programming and software engineering.

The University of Wroclaw supported the course very professionally, we hade a big room available with all the equipment needed. Special thanks to the guest speakers: Jan Filipowski (talk about facebook apps), Robert Pankowecki (ActiveModel), Piotr Sarnecki (Rails engines).

Thanks to all the students for the hard work you put into the exercises and for a good time spent together!



I'm always very happy to teach Rails or speak about Rails related technologies. Contact me by email if you're interested.