Ruby Mendicant University: A New Way to Learn
summary
A free online Ruby school raises $3,050 from 47 donors, enrolls 87 exam‑pass students, and ships a Rails app called University web that tracks submissions, IRC logs, activity feeds and reviews. Courses run three weeks with ~15 students, all materials released up front, asynchronous one‑on‑one help three days a week, and iterative pass‑with‑feedback grading. Outcomes include 22 course completions and 22 open source contributions, emergent lessons about requirements discovery, modular design, testing with mocks, and tooling choices.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (22)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:21Ruby Mendicant University Presented by Gregory Brown (seacreature)
- 0:35What is RMU?
- 1:33FIGHTIN' UNICORNS
- 2:25Why did a community form?
- 3:10What Defines RMU?
- 3:21Core Skills Course
- 3:333 week course
- 3:58No formal lectures
- 4:30Small Class Size
- 5:24Non-sequential Assignments
- 6:37Iterative evaluations
- 7:15Open-ended exercises
- 8:01Academic Principles
- 20:55Separation of Concerns
- 30:51Hacking Guides
- 33:31Emergent Lessons?
- 34:07Working on real problems is the secret sauce of RMU.
- 35:18Ruby Best Practices
- 35:30How in the hell?
- 36:30Teaching Changes Lives
- 36:44I have great students








