Links for Railsbridge Workshops

Installfest

The step-by-step instructions to setting up a development environment that attendees will be using can be found here: http://installfest.railsbridge.org.

Edits can be suggested via the “git” link in the upper right corner of each page, or you can find the whole Installfest here: https://github.com/railsbridge/docs/tree/master/sites/installfest.

Curriculum

The curriculum you’ll be working with can be found here: http://curriculum.railsbridge.org.

Edits can be suggested via the “git” link in the upper right corner of each page, or you can find the whole curriculum here: https://github.com/railsbridge/docs/tree/master/sites/curriculum.

Intro to Programming

If you’re teaching a Beginner class (or possibly also the Advance Beginner class) you’ll want to go over the Complete Beginner’s Guide to Programming before jumping into Rails, deck here: http://curriculum.railsbridge.org/workshop/ruby_for_beginners.

Teacher Training

To preview the delightful information that will be covered in teacher training, see this deck: http://curriculum.railsbridge.org/workshop/teacher_training.

Links for Railsbridge Learn the Front End Workshops

Requirements

There isn’t currently a formal installfest for the front-end workshops. Here are the tools students need:

• Chrome (If you’re experienced with the developer tools in another browser, that may work too.)
• Git
• A Github account of your own
• The code editor of your choice. Komodo Edit is a good open source option, if you don’t have one yet.

Curriculum

The front-end curriculum can be found here: http://curriculum.railsbridge.org/frontend/frontend.

Edits can be suggested via the “git” link in the upper right corner of each page, or you can find the whole curriculum here: https://github.com/railsbridge/docs/tree/master/sites/frontend.

Join the Organizer Mailing List!

If you’d like to help maintain the curriculum or installfest, do meta-organizational things, or just have a great fun time with other people who love helping women learn to code, join our organizer mailing list/Google group here:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/railsbridge-workshops

Advice on Teaching Beginners

Think ahead of time about how you would explain the following:

• What’s a program? Operating system?
• What’s a framework?
  • something that makes it faster to build an application because it contains most of the things you would commonly write
• Workflow – how do you write a program?
  • Learn about customer’s requirements -> translate to “stories”
  • Pick a story that seems doable and start writing code that does it
  • Show your work to the customer, get feedback
  • Based on feedback, adjust stories (customer’s “up front” requirements vs. changes once they see something working)
  • Once story is finished, go back to “pick a story”…keep going until you’re done! (This is an example of looping!)
• Basic programming structures – or, how to do the “start writing code” step
  • variables – words that hold information
  • types of information – text, numbers, collections
  • operators – doing stuff with variables
  • loops – doing the same action a bunch of times
  • printing – to the screen, or to a file
• Writing a simple program
  • opening the editor
  • opening the command line
  • adding two numbers together, storing in a variable
  • printing variable to the screen
  • save and run