Hi, I'm Samuel Roland, a motivated IT student (2nd class of a 3 years-long Bachelor). I'm passionate about programming and Free software, and want to live out of producing Free and ethical software. This project is obviously influenced by my perspective on school and teaching. I appreciate teaching things to others and learning things out of school.
With the fantastic book Peak by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, I discovered and was fascinated by deliberate practice during summer holidays in 2022. After a little retrospective on my last studies in IT and mandatory school, I believe deliberate practice has a huge potential to increase the effectiveness of learning and the engagement of students.
For the context, at my current undergraduate school, we are using Moodle to host files theory/exercises/solutions documents in PDF and presentations as PDF. We use Moodle to release practical works each week. Microsoft Teams is used a bit for informal chatting (email in other cases). We host our code on GitHub, and we use GitHub Classroom to create repositories for each project and get code reviews by the teacher. We get code review by the teacher via a pull request for all programming projects, which is very good. Some teachers have started to use socrative.com to host exercises and do live sessions, and part of my inspiration come from this website.
Retrospective on school years
Looking back at my precedent and current studies, I was frustrated by the big lack of feedback during my school years, especially in my last 4 years learning IT in a professional school. Furthermore, I wish I had regular code reviews of exercises, regular advices on how to write better code, how to write tests (a great way to have fast feedback too), and specific advices on writing good documentations. I'm happy with projects and practice we made, some of them were very interesting, but I regret all the theory periods, where we had only minimal practice.
Before I discovered the term "mental representation" which is a central concept of deliberate practice, I was already trying to have a mental view of programming concepts such as classes, objects, loops, switch, etc... Metaphors, characteristics, and trials, helped me to understand, and explaining things to my colleagues forced me to clarify my mental view to be able to define concepts with precise sentences and appropriate metaphors. If teachers were focused on practice, explaining stories and metaphors to understand abstract concepts, this would increase the chance that students build a strong mental representation of complex concepts, and thus their skills.
But don't get me wrong, even if I have a lot of opinions on how IT teaching should evolve, I like my past and current studies! I just believe that there is a lot to gain by adopting deliberate practice and a dedicated tool, to optimize the learning and teaching process.
A few weeks after the start of my bachelor, I felt the need to have a dedicated application to train intensively on different skills. During a course about logical systems, I thought it would be nice to have a small training app to learn to get fast at numbers conversion (from and to binary, decimals, or hexadecimals).
In other courses like the C++ programming course, I felt that even if I understood most programming concept, I really needed to practice every detail to make sure I understand them fully. To be ready for tests, it was important to have seen edge cases, and to be able to build other skills on top of base ones. Before revising for the first C++ test, I read about 300 slides of theory, I saw that some of the details to remember were not put into practice in exercise or project. As I already did 4 years of IT learning, I knew a part of the basics, and another part distributed among the slides, of new things to revise. At this moment I wish I had a clear view of which skills should be trained, but I had no other way than reading everything, as my level in each skill wasn't measured...
The project began at the end of September 2022 in my head and by brainstorming it with a few classmates. I slowly wrote down the design document to structure my thoughts and present the project. delibay.org was deployed at the end of December 2022, the first mature version of the design document was released, and then I started developing the MVP...
This website is built with Laravel, CommonMark PHP parser, TailwindCSS, the typography plugin and a few chocolate bars :) If you have seen a typo, or you want to suggest changes, please open an Issue or even a PR on the repository delibay/delibay.org !! The whole infrastructure is hosted on a VPS on the Netherlands, on renewable energy, by Greenhost.
delibay.org is a free software released under the AGPL-3.0-or-later.
delibay.org - Presentation website of the Delibay project
Copyright (C) 2022-present Samuel Roland
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.