[TheBiv]

Speaking of what I would love to do as a college student, I think it would be awesome if a professor was doing something as a challenge against me.

Meaning, I think a lot of time students are told to learn by the professor explaining some of the most basal subjects that we all take for granted anyways (like server architecture, HTTP, etc) and not getting to the juicy cool stuff that we can all do with the web.

What my thought would be is that at the beginning of the semester, the professor took a few days and built a website she thought that the website should exist (it doesn't matter what the website was, just that it was created by them in a matter of days).

Then the entire course was the professor taking the students through all of the design decisions that she made and along the way taught the students how to be a hacker and how to build things on the web.

The challenge would come in the fact that the professor would have a running track of how many users/views the site had and as it grew, the professor could talk about the design optimizations and server architecture in a way that the students would normally experience it.

[dkuntz2]

While a cool idea, this places a lot of overhead on a professor who most likely already has a bunch of other stuff they need to get done (even at tiny liberal arts colleges).

Expanding on your idea, collectively, or in small groups, students could build that website. From the idea stage to the production stage.

[TheBiv]

I do completely agree that there is a lot of overhead on the professor, but I tend to believe that any professor that would like this idea would be able to rationalize spending a weekend to be able to explain what she created all semester. I can't imagine a cooler lesson plan than detailing your design decisions as you made them.

[dkuntz2]

Presuming it takes a weekend to solve some sort of problem that at least some other people have. Presuming they're not only a couple weeks ahead of their students in the course's material.

[danoc]

I do like the idea but I'm worried that people would lose interest if we spent too much time on code I wrote.

I think there is value in that though and might incorporate some personal projects and existing into the lecture.

[TheBiv]

I think that is a valid concern, but I think it's straightforward to mitigate it by saying "I can't remember why I did it that way?" But here let's spend this class day taking suggestions of how we could improve it and what I was trying to solve with this bit of code. Which would teach them how to problemsoolve as a group.

I think at the very least, it would allow you a personal, concrete story bc so much of what was lost on me in the beginning were things like "why would I ever use .map instead of .each" in ruby, when that is a terrible question for a newbie to ask. I think a better question would be something like "what's the best way in this case to iterate through a list in ruby"