[LRUG] Mentoring Meetups

[Eleanor]

On 15 May 2007, at 11:05, Stephen Bartholomew wrote:
> The way that seemed most popular was to have an application that we
> work on as a group.  It makes sense to develop something for LRUG -
> maybe somewhere we can have profiles, arrange meet-ups etc.  I know
> this has obviously been done a thousand times before, but it'd be
> good to have focus.  It'd be great to develop an super innovation
> application that changes the world but I think it's more important
> that we have something that covers all the main parts of an  
> application.
>
> We can work through the whole application from design to deployment
> and ongoing maintenance and development.  During that process, the
> group as a whole should be able to fill in and improve on the
> knowledge of individuals.  The mentor's role here would be one of
> guiding the group and development rather than dishing out knowledge.
>
> The application itself can then be bought to the standard meet-ups
> for discussion.  That way we could still tap into the minds of the
> uber-developers that we have in the group.

Unfortunately I couldn't make it along to last night's meeting so I  
missed the chance to discuss this, but  speaking from my experience  
of group developments at Uni. I'm not sure this is the best approach  
to adopt. We're quite a large group so any collaborative project is  
bound to require a lot of organisation and for those relatively new  
to programming I think this approach will fail to engage them  
sufficiently to get over the initial level of frustration when  
they're picked up enough Ruby to be doing something relatively  
ambitious but not yet acquired the experience necessary to know that  
even the toughest problems can be solved with the right combination  
of tenacity and deviousness.

Perhaps a better alternative would be to devise a series of tutorial  
problems that newbies can solve on their own, building in difficultly  
over time. We could publish both the problems and the various  
solutions that are submitted on the LRUG site and that way build a  
useful resource for Ruby newbies everywhere. By studying these  
solutions those who are new to programming as well as to Ruby would  
also develop that most useful of skills: code literacy.

As an additional aid to newcomers to the programming world I think we  
should also compile a list of useful books to help them develop a  
broader understanding of the craft. Whilst it's nowhere near as  
difficult as most non-programmers assume, there's still a lot of  
knowledge out there that can greatly simplify the task and giving  
newcomers a leg-up on acquiring should hopefully improve their skills  
quite dramatically.


Ellie

Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains
----
raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason