Adrien Joly - Teaching

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Between 2015 and 2021, I taught hundreds of students how to develop software in JavaScript and Node.js. (see the Past interventions section, below)

During that period, I experimented the use of various tools and developed my own, to help students understand and practice more effectively, and to assess their understanding reliably and fairly.

Pedagogical Tools I’ve Used

Here is a list of tools I have regularly used to teach classes and assess the understanding of my students.

Communication platforms

• Markdown + Jekyll on GitHub Pages: I write my course material (i.e. mostly guided exercises) in Markdown format and publish it for free, thanks to GitHub Pages.
• GitHub private repositories: I maintain several private repositories in GitHub, to keep the exams I gave to all my students, and their solutions.
• Google Classroom is a platform that one of the schools where I teach has been using to create a virtual space for each classroom, to support communication between students and teachers and to submit assignments.
• Google Forms: to gather code and answers from students, during paper-less exams.
• Straw Poll: to regularly poll the progress of students on the exercises I gave them. It helps me decide when it’s most helpful to provide more tips on how to solve a particular exercice, to prevent students from being stuck for too long. Especially useful for remote classes.

Tools to practice coding skills

• Tech.io: During COVID-19 lockdown, I wrote exercise testers on the Tech.io platform so that students get useful feedback on their code while working autonomously on coding exercises.
• Repl.it: I use this free online IDE to quickly write, re-format, run and share JavaScript programs to my students.
• Codingame: I use this free online server to make my students collaborate on solving algorithmic problems together, by mob programming in the classroom. It’s also a fun way to train individually.

Assessment tools I developed

• I developed énoncé to publish and distribute paper-less exam exercises to my students, expressed in Markdown, and using subtle variants for each student (based on their Student ID) to discourage them from exchanging answers.
• gclass: a CLI to quickly collect the projects submitted by my students through Google Classroom assignments, and store them in a flat text file, for offline batch processing.
• classroom-submissions-to-pdf: to generate a PDF file that contains the code submitted by all my students on a Google Classroom assignment, so I can review and annotate it on my iPad. (see video demo: How to evaluate students’ code by hand, and without paper - YouTube)
• Survey Response Browser: to generate a PDF file that contains the assignments submitted by all my students on Google Forms, so I can review, annotate and return their responses using my iPad. (e.g. thanks to PDF Master)
• js-test: to give auto-graded exercises or exams (including coding exercises) to my students. I wrote this open-source toolkit to help me design exercises and auto-grading scripts, deploy them online, gather answers from students and generate a graded feedback sheets that I return to students. (see video demos: 🇫🇷 Évaluer efficacement ses étudiants - YouTube)

Other tools for student assessment

Check out this living document: js-test competitors & alternatives (for reference) · Issue #61 · adrienjoly/js-test

Past interventions

2019-2021

• Back-end development with Node.js (32h), at EEMI and ESGI (Paris, France), mostly given from home, because of COVID-19 lockdown.

2018-2019

• Use of git for collaborative and open source projects (4h), at EEMI (Paris, France)
• Tech leadership (lead dev) (18h) at La Web School Factory (Paris, France)

2015-2018

Between October 2015 and June 2018, I was giving a Web Programming Basics with JavaScript course (~40 hours) to 4 classes of 1st-year students, at EEMI (Paris, France).

• Course material: Cours JavaScript
• My learnings, as a teacher: Enseigner le développement web à 85 étudiants sans s’arracher les cheveux (French)

Last update was June 5th, 2021. History

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