Teaching PHP

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)

PHP topics (to come)

Problems

• Command line is considered as too complex
• Willingness not to use libraries/framework
• Tasks only include reading from a database

Basically teaching PHP 3 using 5.6 components!

What should we teach?

Free resources

(that we do not use)

• Conferences Youtube channel (PHPUK, PHPNW...)
• Sites (PHP the Right Way, PHP Security, GetAwesomeness...)
• Podcasts (PHP roundtable, PHP TownHall...)
• PHPschool.io
• User groups: how many lecturers do you know / have you met in UG or conferences?

Professional certifications

A good source to establish a good program?

Too advanced?

Professional training

Example: Zend training

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

Moving forward

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

So, what to do?

Prerequisites?

From students:

• Use an operating system: file browsing, text editing...
• (Command line interface and basics of using Linux CLI?)
• Willingness to learn!

From institutions:

• Up to date servers
• IDEs or complex text editor (at least syntax coloration)
• Up to date knowledge (no md5 for passwords as seen in lectures...)

Introduction

• HTML / CSS
• Frontend Javascript (VanillaJS and jQuery)
• – HTTP basics: simple request diagram? –
• Show some simple code (templating)
• Tools (IDE, advanced text editor, command line tools?)

Getting to know PHP

• Simple multipage website (using array as data source?)
• Forms
• Sessions and cookies
• Database (only Mysql? ORMs should be there? migrations?)

Advanced (?) PHP

Are frameworks an advanced notion? Why can we teach ASP.NET MVC straight without learning C# in a REPL first?

Is that a good place to discuss PHP-FIG and code standards?

Where should extra resources be discussed? Too late for GIT at this stage isn't it? But composer rely on GIT...

Security

Should it even be a lecture?

Auroraeosrose: security is not a feature

Suggestion from DundeePHP: study selected existing code, legacy applications (real world use cases)