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by James Robertson.
Original Post: moment of educational truth
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I've been teaching the new intro class for two days now - it's kind of an education for me as well. I knew the rythms of the old course, where people got into trouble, etc. With this new one, I don't know yet. I was able to get some immediate feedback this afternoon though. After we went through an exercise, I demonstrated SUnit, and how the RB integration works. The students seemed to like the integration, and then I had a task for them - take some broken code (a one up/one down counter) and write tests for the broken methods. The tests should fail - once they got that far, they had to fix the code.
It took some of them awhile, but they got the test methods coded, and the methods fixed. Yeah, this is backwards in TDD terms. On the other hand, getting code without tests is an all too common occurence - so learning how to create tests for the expected output is a valuable exercise in its own right. Now, if I can take my own advice and start creating tests for BottomFeeder....