Contents tagged with Teaching
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Running an intern program
This year I am running an unpaid internship program for high school students. I work for a small company. We have ideas for a few side projects but never have time to do them. So we experiment by making them intern projects. In return, we give these interns guidance to learn, personal attentions, and opportunities with real-world projects.
A few years ago, I blogged about the idea of teaching kids to write application with no more than 6 hours of training. This time, I was able to reduce the instruction time to 4 hours and immediately put them into real work projects. When they encounter problems, I combine directions, pointer to various materials on w3school, Udacity, Codecademy and UTube, as well as encouraging them to search for solutions with search engines. Now entering the third week, I am more than encouraged and feeling accomplished. Our the most senior intern, Christopher Chen, is a recent high school graduate and is heading to UC Berkeley to study computer science after the summer. He previously only had one year of Java experience through the AP computer science course but had no web development experience. Only 12 days into his internship, he has already gain advanced css skills with deeper understanding than more than half of the “senior” developers that I have ever worked with. I put him on a project to migrate an existing website to the Orchard content management system (CMS) with which I am new as well. We were able to teach each other and quickly gain advanced Orchard skills such as creating custom theme and modules. I felt very much a relationship similar to the those between professors and graduate students. On the other hand, I quite expect that I will lose him the next summer to companies like Google, Facebook or Microsoft.
As a side note, Christopher and I will do a two part Orchard presentations together at the next SoCal code camp at UC San Diego July 27-28. The first part, “creating an Orchard website on Azure in 60 minutes”, is an introductory lecture and we will discuss how to create a website using Orchard without writing code. The 2nd part, “customizing Orchard websites without limit”, is an advanced lecture and we will discuss custom theme and module development with WebMatrix and Visual Studio.
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Fun with Orchard, Webmatrix, Git and Azure
Why Orchard?
Our company wants to convert an old html site to a content management system. We considered between Wordpress and Orchard and picked Orchard. This post strongly influenced us. It is ASP.NET MVC vs php. We are a .net shop. We thought it would be easier to do custom development with Orchard.
Why Webmatrix?
There are a few reason we used Webmatrix:
- Webmatrix works with Orchard very well. Many Orchard training materials use Webmatrix.
- Webmatrix is free. We have interns here working on Orchard. We do not have to consume a Visual Studio license.
- Webmatrix has an excellent story working with both Git and Azure.
Why Git?
We would like to have a version control system. Git is a free and open source distributed version control system. There are several free Git hosts, such as GitHub, Codeplex, and BitBucket. So we picked Git.
Why Azure?
We would like to have website that our entire team can see. Azure web site is an excellent option for us. It is very easy to host Orchard with an Azure website, either with Sql Compact Edition or with Azure SQL Database. Azure also integrates with Git very well.
So how do they work together?
Although it is possible to edit a Azure hosted web site directly with Webmatrix, we hosted out source code in Git because we need a source control system.
It is very easy to work with Git from Webmatrix. One can use git with an existing site or open a site directly from git.
The Sql Server migration solution in Webmatrix is amongst the easiest way to migrate a Sql CE database to Azure SQL Database.
It is also fairly easy to setup an Azure website to pull source code from git directly and build the source code. Each time when we push a changeset to git, Azure is notified and it will automatically pull and build the website. For Orchard, the “built” is actually not more than an xcopy. We just need to embed a .deployment file in our source code. See David Haden’s post for more details.
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Teaching high school kids web programming (Part II)
A few months ago, I thought of teaching high school kids asp.net programming. I let the idea sit for a few months. Now that summer has started, I think about this again. The following communication with Microsoft Scott Hunter by InfoQ caught my attention:
Web Matrix is the tool for Web Pages, their lightweight IDE to compete directly with PHP.
Three ways to create web pages using ASP.NET and Visual Studio:
- Web Pages: Extremely light weight, easy to build pages. No infrastructure needed, very much like PHP or classic ASP. Full control over the HTML being generated.
- MVC: Same light-weight view engine as Web Pages, but backed by the full MVC framework. Full control over the HTML being generated. Upgrade cycle is approximately 1 year.
- Web Forms: Component-based web development. Use when time to delivery is essential. Especially suited for internal development where full control over the look and feel isn’t essential. Upgrade cycle is tied to the core .NET Framework.
The Scott went further to mention that “the Razor view model was designed for Web Pages first, then adopted by MVC 3.”
So ASP.NET Web Pages is exactly what I needed. Although I have heard WebMatrix and Razor for a while (I even attempted to convert webform to Razor), I have failed to take WebMatrix seriously. We already got Visual Studio and the free Express edition. I always though Razor is just another view syntax to save a few key strokes until I realized that the Web Pages could be used without MVC. I found several tutorials on Web Pages:
The ASP.NET WebMatrix Tutorial (You my download the same material as a PDF eBook)
Web Development 101 using WebMatrix
Web Camp WebMatrix training kit
These tutorial has everything that I need in my original goal without any more work me:
- Be able to teach for just a few hours and get kids productive.
- Close to HTML without the complication of OOP and black box (e.g., the complicated life cycle of WebForm).
- Simple data access with SQL statements.
Just a side note. Although the tutorials use WebMatrix, I could do everything in Visual Studio as well (though I did not try the Express edition). Just need to install ASP.NET MVC3 with latest Visual Studio tools. This will get Razor tools installed. Then create an empty website as the Razor tools are current not in the template for an empty web application.
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Teaching high school kids ASP.NET programming
During the 2011 Microsoft MVP Global Summit, I have been talking to people about teaching kids ASP.NET programming. I want to work with volunteer organizations to provide kids volunteer opportunities while learning technical skills that can be applied elsewhere. The goal is to teach motivated kids enough skill to be productive with no more than 6 hours of instruction. Based on my prior teaching experience of college extension courses and involvement with high school math and science competitions, I think this is quite doable with classic ASP but a challenge with ASP.NET. I don’t want to use ASP because it does not provide a good path into the future. After some considerations, I think this is possible with ASP.NET and here are my thoughts:
· Create a framework within ASP.NET for kids programming.
· Use existing editor. No extra compiler and intelligence work needed.
· Using a subset of C# like a scripting language. Teaches data type, expression, statements, if/for/while/switch blocks and functions. Use existing classes but no class creation and OOP.
· Linear rendering model. No complicated life cycle.
· Bare-metal html with some MVC style helpers for widget creation; ASP.NET control is optional. I want to teach kids to understand something and avoid black boxes as much as possible.
· Use SQL for CRUD with a helper class. Again, I want to teach understanding rather than black boxes.
· Provide a template to encourage clean separation of concern.
· Provide a conversion utility to convert the code that uses template to ASP.NET MVC. This will allow kids with AP Computer Science knowledge to step up to ASP.NET MVC.
Let me know if you have thoughts or can help.