search

gvwilson / teachtogether.tech

Teaching Tech Together
http://teachtogether.tech/
Other
227 stars 49 forks source link

Mention exercism.io for practicing programming against test suites #209

Closed katrinleinweber closed 1 year ago

katrinleinweber commented 6 years ago

Hi Greg!

Just before What Misconceptions Do Novices Have? you dedicate a few paragraphs to unit-tests in a learning context. Over in https://github.com/carpentries/lesson-example/issues/163 I suggested to mention exercism.io as a useful "learn more" resource. Same suggestion here.

What do you think?

Disclosure: I volunteer as a mentor in the R track there.

gvwilson commented 6 years ago

Thanks for the pointer - are there other online teach-yourself-coding sites we could link to as well? And do you know anything about the pedagogical quality of exercism.io's exercises? https://doi.org/10.1145/3017680.3017728 found that most online coding tutorials were strong on coding and weak on pedagogy; I'd like to recommend something, but I'd like it to be something that is strong on both fronts.

katrinleinweber commented 6 years ago

I am not aware that they follow a specific pedagogy, but because they encourage mentorship, refactoring, "intrinsic motivation" and "reduce unnecessary friction", I see a lot of overlap to the Carpentries pedagogy. Maybe more than other coding tutorial sites, but I have too little experience with those to judge.

Arguably, exercism.io specifically provides what (I understood) T3 mentions as "One approach to teaching better testing practices is to define a programming problem by providing a set of tests to be passed rather than through a written description".

katrinleinweber commented 6 years ago

Also fits to Exercise Types > Refactoring ;-)