Fresh approach?

[gregmalcolm]

At the moment the learning material is a little dry (and not the good kind of DRY). I've been working through @larrymyers' backbone-koans (https://github.com/larrymyers/backbone-koans) and think he might be onto something on how to make good koans when the subject matter is a framework rather than a language.

Larry's approach is less about letting the magic of assertion reveal the knowledge, but to guide the learning through commented instructions and links to learning sources. Kind of like advanced koans. Also he combines his koans with a popular backbone demo (todo app), and applies a lot of the exercises directly on the todo app itself, thus given the student a frame of reference, and also helping them read the todo app code. I like this because I've glanced at the todo app before, but not really taken the time to try and understand it. This is forcing me to!

Also I think in the early stages we could teach the student how to leverage chrome debugger/firefox to solve problems. Perhaps tell them to run jquery commands on the specrunner.html (or some other page) that returns a result that they need to apply as an answer with a useful link or 2 on how this is actually done.

Of couse, not sure I'll find the time to actually do this, but thought I'd throw it out there... :)