I replied to kendalk and mentioned that forming teams and having competitions might be overwhelming in the beginning, but maybe it makes sense to two individual semester semester-long prizes for a CS major and non-CS major that build the coolest product.
I think we'll probably have them start on Ruby since we have a few students that can teach it and have experience in RoR.
> Perhaps you could set up teams that could compete with each other through a series of programming challenges?
I like the idea but I think students might find this to be too much in the beginning. Especially when CS majors are competing with non-CS majors.
Maybe a better option is to promote the Binghamton hackathon from early on and offer prizes/competition for the groups that entered without experience.
> You could find a local business who would sponsor a prize, or a restaurant that would offer a dinner for the winning team.
I definitely want to keep it as local as possible and even have a few community members signed up.
> Be sure to post updates on your group's website.
I'd recommend following the progress on Twitter and GitHub:
I think can definitely be done if it's taught quickly. Much of that can be condensed into 10 minutes then taught again when people are starting to get the hang of things.
> So, this is web development in general, not specifically CS software engineering, or electrical engineering, right?
We really just want to encourage people to get together and build stuff, but the weekly lessons will teach web development.
It'd be great to expand to other areas (especially hardware) in the future.
> Make sure that students are actually doing stuff for everything after the fundamentals lecture: write a static homepage, write a pong game, write a simple message board, etc.
I totally agree, but how can we do that? My best guess is to have 30-45 mins of lectures then encourage them to spend the next 1.5 hours using the lecture material to work on creating a personal website.
> I would have them build anything and everything with the caveat that no matter how good they were (or weren't) the quality of their code would suck looking back in 5 years
Great point!
I had a similar experience growing up, but I think a lot of people that want to learn quickly give up.
What do you think we can do to keep people excited about it? I was talking to a few friends at UMich and they suggested we have them build their own personal websites so they have something tangible they can show their friends.
My main concern is that 2/3 of the people signed up don't have any programming experience, so it will be hard to keep it interesting for CS majors and slow enough for everyone else.
We were thinking of starting off with HTML/CSS since it's not taught in classes then progressing to a server-side language + framework.
I've recommended all of the non-CS majors to go through the JavaScript Codecademy lessons over break to learn the programming fundamentals so they can keep up when we dive into Ruby and RoR (or some other language/framework).
https://medium.com/@lexkon/sound-design-studies-wunderlist-3...