The best way to learn coding - and in particular c# and .NET Core - is to code. CodeArt is proud to make all the teaching materials to a newly created course online and freely available for self-study.
I have in the past written about the HackYourFuture coding school in Copenhagen. It's a wonderful place, where passionate volunteer developers with a lot of industry experience, share their knowledge with just as passionate students that are typically immigrants, refugees or asylum seekers in Denmark. For the last year and a half I have been involved as a mentor with them arranging various events - and this february/march I held a 5 week master class for alumni students introducing them to .NET Core, Object Oriented Programming and c#. The students had completed the HYF curriculum program which is very focused on Javascript/HTML/CSS/React/Node - so the course is assuming similar background knowledge, but at the same trying to introduce the basics of Object Oriented Programming as well as the .NET platform.
The Game
Obviously, it's hard to decide how to structure a course that in such a short time can give a good allround introduction. The approach we took here was to let the students do a lot of coding - and coding on 1 single project throughout the course.
The project was a basic, simple card game - the game of Thirty-One. First, they would create the basic game logic and a text based version as a Console Application, then split out logic to a class library and prepare it for web use. Then, create an ASP.NET Core Web version using MVC and Razor, based on the same class library - and finally publish it to their own Azure Web App Service, with game state maintained in Azure Storage.
All along the way, the steps are explained, exercises go into details, and a video will introduce the consepts needed to be understood.
Here is a screenshot of a solution, one of the students (Svetlana Ceca) ended up with:
Teaching materials
It was an in-person class, held 4 out of 5 times on location in Microsoft Denmark's office (MSFT were kind enough to sponsor both food and facilities). The 5th time had to be moved online due to the Corona pandemic. In the nature of HackYourFuture we made sure to put all teaching materials on Github so students that missed a class could still follow along. This includes both curriculum, exercises, videos and sample solutions. And now, it's available and free to use for anyone who wants to improve their skills and learn a new platform and way of coding.
All the materials are available here:
https://github.com/AThraen/HackYourFuture.NETMasterClass
You can user either a Mac or a windows based PC to follow along, but the course assumes you have Visual Studio Community installed and .NET Core 3.1.
If you enjoy it and find it useful, please leave a comment below and tell me about your experience! If you spot an error, drop me a mail or even better, submit a PR in Github.
Recent posts