Chaminade Julienne Summer STEMM Camp

A Chance Encounter

Through a connection at the Southwest Ohio
Givecamp we were contacted by Meg
Draeger, coordinator for Chaminade Julienne Catholic High School’s
STEMM Summer Camp in nearby Dayton, OH.
The program targets grades 7-9 and strives to provide campers with a
sampling of science, technology, engineering, math and medicine. Meg
was interested in adding a session on software development. A couple
emails and a phone call later, and we were on the schedule for a 90
minute session entitled simply, “Web Development with Ruby on Rails.”

Perfect Timing

Through previous experience teaching web development at Little Miami
and Ludlow high schools we knew that maximizing learning and
minimizing distractions would be our greatest challenge. That’s where
our friends at Nitrous.IO came to the
rescue. With Nitrous we could just login and get to work with a fully
functional and completely integrated Rails development environment.

Furthermore, the Nitrous team hooked us up with sufficient invites to
allow all the students to pair up and program to their hearts’
content. We literally couldn’t have done it without them. NOTE:
They’re just coming out of their private beta. So we encourage you to
check them out!

Chaminade Julienne Summer STEMM Camp
attendees running their Ruby on Rails application live on the
Web.

CJ Eagle Pride!

On the day of our session, Chris Nelson and I headed up I-75 excited
to share our love of Ruby, Rails and Nitrous. Again drawing on
previous experience we had decided to have the students create a
simple wish list application
using Ruby on Rails’ scaffold generator. After some experimentation
with their running apps we refactored them to add some desired
functionality, mainly the ability to click on links to wish items
which introduced views in Rails and to hide wishes that had already
been granted which introduced controllers.

Observations

As previously mentioned, we paired up the campers and gave them the
basic rules about switching roles; the navigator can request the
keyboard at any time and to avoid swapping roles too frequently which
I thought might become a problem but didn’t. One third of the nine
pairs swapped without prompting. The remainder had to be encouraged to
do so. There were no major logistical issues.

The campers were very engaged and warmed to the material quickly.
There was the usual mix of eager and timid campers but no one seemed
too lost or aloof. The first a-ha moment came when the campers started
their skeleton Rails apps the first time then previewed them running
live on the Web. The second a-ha moment came when they removed the
default index page and displayed their empty wish list for the first
time. Once we demonstrated that they could enter and save data all we
had to do was sit back and watch. For us, that’s the most rewarding
part.

Thanks to Nitrous it is easy to share our passion for learning,
building and sharing. Chris and I would like to thank Meg for inviting
us to participate in their program and hope that we inspired the
students. Thanks also to the students for sharing their energy and
inspiring us!