Reflecting on week 2 (TDD) teaching

[Conorc1000]

It was useful to listen to the Stop Go Continue of the Friday before the TDD week. Three of the points which we acted on were

1. Could we see the Syllabus before the week starts.
2. Could we have some optional home work before the week starts.
3. We would like to create some thing each day
   • Monday started with a morning challenge, writing functions to pass pre-written tests, we thought this was a good segue from Codewars .Then we moved to making TDD readmes. The Readmes all had to include a tutorial so that 2 hrs of the day could be given to doing the other groups tutorials instead of just reading them. Each group was given a broad area to research. At 18:00 8th light came to give a talk on the broader importance of paired programming.
   • Tuesday had lots of contact time and short tasks. In the morning we presented the Jarkyn's (8th Light) TDD Romanizer workshop. We thought that FAC7 would want more guidance with this but they seems to grasp it pretty fast so we cut the tutorial short and let them work on it by them selves. In the review session we looks at a few of the pairs results, FAC 7 also asked for a model answer to be posted so we did that. At 11:30 Matt ran a functional programming class. At 14:00 they were given the Vending Machine tutorial made by Nelson, this was generally done to a high standard but people did struggle with bonus questions as they involved installing Hapi and Istanbul.
   • Wednesday started with a morning challenge where each pair had to write tests for our prewritten functions. Then we presented the project for the week, to make a stopwatch using TDD. We decided this should be a 2 day project because when we did it during FAC 6 in an afternoon we did not get very far. The projects were done in pairs with instructions to use the ping pong technique. I think this stopped people not writing any tests themselves.
   • Thursday carried on with the projects.
   • Friday had the normal structure.

Generally I think being flexible with timing helped during this week, there were a few times when the timetable was changes to give FAC 7 more or less time if they were bored or struggling to complete something.

[sofer]

@Conorc1000 my impression was that this week was very successful. I was pretty blown away by the quality of work. The combination of well-tested code with some really creative frontend work seemed to me a big step up from previous courses and was a complete vindication of the FAC6 decision to do a testing week.

Curriculum: I have added a new section to the FAC7 book, copied your syllabus and created pull request.

People always want model answers. It's a reasonable request. It's probably something we need to add to http://fac7.foundersandcoders.org/leaders/index.html. Extra work for us though!

Creating something every day is also a reasonable request. Perhaps we need to tone down the jigsaw day or combine it with a mini-project.

Also, I wonder if the balance between 2-person and 4-person projects might need to be revisited.

[rug1]

I thought that this TDD week went very well and think it should be included in all future FACs. Having a whole week of TDD emphasised its importance and we encouraged them all to stick to it as much as they could throughout the whole of the week. Even though some people struggled I think on the whole many people did stick to completing their tasks using TDD. I was also very impressed with the quality of all their stopwatch projects on Friday, they were all done to such a high standard! Hopefully this week will encourage them to carry on testing throughout the whole course.