2020-07-31 –, Red Track
We will share our learnings from creating a Julia curriculum on Exercism that teaches Julia to users with previous programming experience based on practice exercises, automated as well as community-sourced and individual human mentoring. Further we will share how Julia users teaching workshops or classes can benefit from our project, and why we think that Exercism benefits the community as a whole.
To motivate the development of the new version and curriculum of the Exercism Julia Track (referred to as v3 from now on), we will briefly outline the history of Exercism, and the major problems of previous versions, mainly large amounts of repeated work by mentors and a lack of structured progression through concepts that the student needs to learn when learning Julia. The human interaction and mentoring is the core of Exercism, and the v3 curriculum is built around making these interactions as meaningful as possible.
During the development of v3, we first identified concepts that make Julia unique and that users must know in order to reach “fluency” in the language. Then, we built bite-sized concept exercises that teach these concepts, ideally isolated from other concepts. These will be mentored automatically based on a normalization of the solution and community-sourced feedback. Solving these exercises unlocks practice exercises that can be used to deepen learned concepts and allow many different approaches whose merits can be discussed with a human mentor.
While there are many great resources for learning Julia, information on how to create such resources is scarce. By sharing our experiences, challenges and learnings from creating v3, we hope to encourage others to create learning resources and share our approach to creating one. Additionally, we believe that the tooling, primarily the normalization of solutions, and the exercise pool can be of use to others teaching Julia.
Physics student from Cologne, Germany.