JS and Ruby Courses: Require learners to write tests for the projects in the Computer Science section

[JoshDevHub]

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Describe your suggestion

Proposed changes

In both the Ruby and JavaScript courses, the testing section should be moved ahead of the computer science section. Then, for the projects in the computer science section, instructions should be updated to tell learners to write tests for their code. This will include:

• The recursion projects (merge sort and Fibonacci)
• The linked list project
• The binary search tree project
• The knight travails project

It may also end up including the hash map project depending on how #30247 is resolved.

Why?

This is an idea that's meant to solve a couple of different problems:

1. Learners could use more practice writing their own tests, particularly in the JavaScript course, where Battleship is on the only project learners get to work on writing their own tests in a vanilla JS context.
2. Because none of the computer science projects feature tests, verifying solutions is cumbersome. It often involves driver scripts and manually checking stdout, which is a decidedly inferior experience compared to automated testing.

Issue Tracking

This issue is going to be an epic I use to track the different pieces of this. The first two subissues can be done in any order, but the final item needs to come after the first two have been completed.

Path

Ruby / Rails, Node / JS

Lesson Url

Computer Science and Testing sections

(Optional) Discord Name

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(Optional) Additional Comments

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