Teaching PHP – DundeePHP February 2016 – About me

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Teaching PHP – DundeePHP February 2016 – About me

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talk-2016-02-25-teaching-php-dundeephp

Talk about my own experience in teaching PHP, especially about my doubts and questions, for Dundee PHP, 25/02/2016

On Github tdutrion / talk-2016-02-25-teaching-php-dundeephp

Teaching PHP

DundeePHP February 2016

By Thomas Dutrion / @tdutrion - 25/02/2016

About me

  • Founder & Developer / web architect at Engineor
  • Working with PHP since 2003
  • Doing my best to work properly!

About me

  • Part time lecturer at Edinburgh Napier University

Disclaimer

  • Feedback and questions on my own experiences
  • A personal learning experience
  • Not against Edinburgh Napier University (or any other university) teaching stategies
  • Nothing personal against anyone, again just an attempt to move forward

Your background

  • Who considers himself or herself as self taught?
  • Who has a computing science degree?(even if you consider yourself as self-taught)

My educational background

  • DUT informatique (Université Pierre Mendès France - 2nd year)
  • BSc computing (Edinburgh Napier University - 3rd year)
  • MSCi computing (Edinburgh Napier University - 5th year)

My French experience

  • Lots of mathematics
  • Lots of lectures / practicals hours (40 hours a week)
  • Very theoretical
  • Not even university, supposed to be practical learning...

My Scottish experience

  • Project based learning
  • Lectures and practicals only 12 hours a week
  • Plenty of time to learn on my own
  • Not much to learn in class, already knew most of it

Am I never satisfied?

I'm French after all...

My current situation

  • Teaching an hour of lecture a week, a senior lecturer teaches the second hour
  • Module including HTML, CSS, Javascript/jQuery and PHP
  • More than 100 second year students with various backgrounds and knowledge
  • 13 weeks of teaching
  • A PHP 5.6 server, students connecting with WinSCP and editing using something similar to Notepad.

PHP topics (already covered)

Subject Students reactions Introduction to PHP Create a simple website (use PHP for templating) Forms, cookies and sessions PHP and databases (mysqli and PDO) Database migrations (phinx) and professional practices (GIT, PSRs, jobs and certifications...) CMS

PHP topics (to come)

Subject Expected student reactions Frameworks Security Code quality

Problems

  • Command line is considered as too complex
  • Willingness not to use to many external libraries/framework
  • Coursework only include fetching data from a database and linking pages

Basically teaching PHP 3 using 5.6 components(mysqli instead of mysql)!

What should we teach?

Subject Importance Basics +++ Frameworks +++ CMS - Command line interface and cron + Deployment and cloud + Security +++ IDEs and advanced text editor ++ Versioning +++

Free resources

(that we do not use)

Professional certifications

A good source to establish a good program?

Too advanced?

Professional training

Example: Zend training

Title Duration (hours) Requirement PHP 1: foundations 20 PHP 2: higher structures 22.5 Knowing the basics (PHP 1 or equivalent) PHP for Experienced (non PHP) OO/Procedural Programmers 16 Being a programmer in C, Java, C++, C#, JavaScript, Python, Perl, Ruby, VB.net for 2 years Building Security into your PHP Applications 8 Basic to advanced knowledge of PHP 5 is recommended including experience developing PHP 5 applications.

A total of 52.5 hours to get from 0 to a supposedly good PHP developer.

From Napier modules website Mode of activity Learning & Teaching Activity NESH (Study Hours) Face To Face Lecture 24 Face To Face Practical classes and workshops 24 Independent Learning Guided independent study 152 Total Study Hours 200

Moving forward

  • Should we focus on basics or teach current technologies?
  • Should we teach concepts instead of syntax?
  • How to update lecturers knowledge and skills, how to get them involved?

Thanks for having me (again)!

Please continue the discussion here, on Slack (slack.scotlandphp.co.uk) or ping me on Twitter (@tdutrion).

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Teaching PHP DundeePHP February 2016 By Thomas Dutrion / @tdutrion - 25/02/2016