[Newbies] [ANN] Koans for Teaching the Basics of Smalltalk

[Christopher Hogan]

I have been plugging away at these for the last couple days in my free time.  Great fun!
I have just a couple comments.
Under KoanAboutAsserts near the beginning, Koan test03assertReality should probably give you a hint that the intent is for you to change xx to make the assertion true.  The first few don't have xx in them so i spent a bit more time then it should have to figure out what was suppose to be the "blank" to fill in. 
I just went back and checked and it looks like I solved the first 3 tests with xx in them by changing the other value to be xx too. /faceplam
The other thing I noticed is that sometimes the error message is a dead give away. 
For example test12do under KoanAboutCollectionProtocoll you get the followingError message: Expected 'FILL ME I...etc... but was 10. at:
The FILL ME In part is ok, but it says it was expecting 10 so all you have to do is change the xx to 10 without knowing why.  I am not sure what a good way to fix that would be, but it might be worth meditating about.
At any rate, overall I have really enjoyed the program and it's helped me to think about a few things I haven't bothered with before.
ThanksChris Hogan 

> From: michaelperscheid at googlemail.com
> Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 16:31:28 +0100
> To: beginners at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> Subject: [Newbies] [ANN] Koans for Teaching the Basics of Smalltalk
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> it's a pleasure for me to announce the Koans tutorial project for teaching beginners the basics of Smalltalk. Inspired by the Edgecase Ruby Koans project and the original "The little Lisper" book by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen, we have implemented Smalltalk Koans in order to help our students to get started with Smalltalk. 
> 
> Smalltalk Koans will guide you as a Smalltalk novice from first steps in Smalltalk to your first small project. The path is simple: You get a task, you solve it and, in the process, learn something. The Koans Sensei (jap.: teacher) will be your guide and introduce you to fundamental concepts in Smalltalk such as strings, blocks, collections and many more.
> 
> After a first internal use, we'd like to announce that we make this tutorial project available for the community.
> 
> https://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/hirschfeld/trac/SqueakCommunityProjects/wiki/smalltalk_koans
> 
> Especially, we'd like to acknowledge our student assistants, Eric Seckler, Robin Schreiber, and Partick Rein for implementing Koans in Smalltalk.
> 
> If you have any wishes for new lectures and feedback to existing ones, please let us know.
> 
> Best regards,
> Michael_______________________________________________
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