Category: Aha

14 THINGS THAT ARE OBSOLETE IN 21ST CENTURY SCHOOLS

5/3/2014

Posted by ingvihrannar | February 26, 2014 | English

This post has received so many hits that the author's site is failing!
I've posted it here but this is NOT MY WORK! Link:
http://ingvihrannar.com/14-things-that-are-obsolete-in-21st-century-schools

Saying that it has always been this way, doesn’t count as a legitimate justification to why it should stay that way. Teacher and administrators all over the world are doing amazing things, but some of the things we are still doing, despite all the new solutions, research and ideas out there is, to put it mildly, incredible.

I’m not saying we should just make the current system better… we should change it into something else.

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The strangeness of conventions

1/11/2011

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Yes, I'm an old fuddy-duddy. I started programming back in the 80's and learned Turbo Pascal and Modula-2.

I still remember that making code readable was about using helpful names for variables and functions... and ALWAYS make sure those names were visually different so that you wouldn't confuse them. (e.g. $user, $users, $Users)

Well, welcome to the world of Ruby on Rails.

if Michael Hartl's tutorial is any indication, then this world is chock full of references to things that all look the same. So far, I've discovered that the following are very VERY different, yet they look so similar. These are all variables, instances or classes. (I get so confused!)

user
users
User
@user

micropost
microposts
Micropost
@micropost

And yes, I do find all this hard on my tired old eyes. While it might "read more like English" I have to wonder at what cost. I'm sure someday I'll lose hours trying to find a bug that was more about a missing (or extra) "s" than anything else.

If being readable means that my code is hardly debugable, then maybe we've "swung the pendulum" too far!

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TDD errors != Rails errors (Rails 3.0 vs 3.1)

27/10/2011

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What is happening when your code runs fine, the tutorial shows that your code should be "RSpec green", but it isn't?

For me, it's time to go to StackOverflow.com again. The hardest part was searching for the right answer. But once it was found, it just works!

So, for those of you stuck in (Michael Hartl's awesome Rails Tutorial) chapter 10 and wondering why you now have RSpec giving you 7-10 errors, don't worry!

I had suspected all along that this was just one of the differences between Rails 3.0 and Rails 3.1, and it appears that I was right! When searching for "test_sign_in" the 4th hit took me here, and the answer redirected me here, where I received the bizarre but efficient changes that needed to be made.

In sessions_helper, find def sign_in

old:
current_user = user
new:
current_user = user
@current_user = user

Also in sessions_helper, find def sign_out

old:
current_user = nil
new:
current_user = nil
@current_user = nil

Even the author is left guessing why this works. But it's small, efficient, and keeps the tests nice and small. After all, each test should test one and only one thing, right?!

[TDD = Test Driven Development]

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Learning how RSpec works

24/10/2011

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RSpec seems to make such intuitive sense, and now that I've started to wrap my head around TDD, I am starting to see the benefit. Sure, initial development may be slower, but the overall development approach should help over the long-term maintenance of your code.

But then, RSpec completely stumped me.

Thanks to the folks at StackOverflow, because this post, explains my problem exactly. After multiple tries, my test just wouldn't work. But with this explanation, I started wondering how the "click_link ...." test was working. Then it hit me: each "click_link" represents a user click, so the following test is now looking at the new page (just "clicked") and not the path I had specified above. AHA!

Very interesting (and, sadly, unintuitive for the newbie).

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Heroku now working (...sigh...)

24/10/2011

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Small victory dance. (My Heroku solution was here.)

Knowing how much more there is to come, I'm a little overwhelmed.

By the way, big kudos to the people who provide answers at StackOverflow. For all the scouring of the web that I've been doing, the best answers keep coming from there. Thanks to you all!

Now, back at the tutorial!

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Author: Graham Rich

Technology teacher.
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Currently employed with
New Brunswick's Department of Education (also known as EECD)

Experience:
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Witty.ca - Mr. Rich's Professional Archives

14 THINGS THAT ARE OBSOLETE IN 21ST CENTURY SCHOOLS

The strangeness of conventions

TDD errors != Rails errors (Rails 3.0 vs 3.1)

Learning how RSpec works

Heroku now working (...sigh...)

Author: Graham Rich

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