kodikos
commented
8 years ago I don't think we're totally averse to using other materials - if a student is using some other resource to learn from and wants help, we won't turn them away! I see many students using codewars, for example. Recommending materials probably should require vetting as you suggest, but I don't see an issue with us making these in further reading sections. I think the tutorials written by codebar are for helping students who may not have even opened anything else but a browser get started on coding. They can also help the coaches have a basis for ensuring students have certain skills before proceeding to more difficult things. They are a very mild learning curve that produce results very quickly, acting as a great confidence builder. I myself am trying to expand the PHP guides, and am involved with improving the downloads for sample files (which I'm going to try to get students to do!). But my free time is limited and it's because of this voluntary contributing that we don't always have the tutorials as refined as they could be. It's also an iterative process, students need to try them out and we learn from problems with them. We'll get there eventually :) I think one point of issue that may need considering is how many languages we support and why - it can be tricky getting the right mix of coaches for what students want to learn, and we should question whether we're spreading ourselves too thin. I'd say have a go at raising PR's to include links to other guides (maybe one at a time - no one likes a huge PR to review!), and mark them as needing to vet what they link to, then each one has a chance to be reviewed and discussed separately. Sound good?
octopusinvitro
decentral1se
Hi there, awesome codebar humans!
I wanted to open up a discussion about using existing learning material for tutorials at codebar. The existing tutorials are great, so a big :+1: to any one who put that work in. This issue is not meant to belittle work that any one has done or yet to do!
So, some tutorials are incomplete (see https://github.com/codebar/tutorials/issues/149) and as I can see from https://github.com/codebar/tutorials/issues/284 and https://github.com/codebar/tutorials/issues/262, the tutorials also need maintenance and improvement. A lot of work!!!
Why is codebar not using existing materials to cut down the work load? Given the world is full of really smart people, it is almost guaranteed to find some decent material on a range of topics. If it isn't great, then it could be incorporated into a more user friendly format, but at least used as a base.
The material would need to be vetted first, I suppose. Acceptance criteria could include:
The benefits I can see are:
For example, for Python, there are many resources. One I've used to teach before is http://pymbook.readthedocs.io/en/latest/.
What do you think? I'd love to help if people want to move forward with that.