n00b School

[l0gic]

Pretend you're a n00b (if you have to) attending an online school for general IT studies (any and all computer-related subjects). The material provided by this school is completely web-based, and organized in a hierarchy so that each student must progress through courses in order of difficulty.

In a traditional education system, students would be tested at the end of each course to gauge their comprehension of the subject matter, ultimately achieving a pass or fail grade. However, as a n00b attending an online, community-driven school, how would you most prefer to be advanced through the curriculum?

Multiple-choice: Your standard A/B/C/D(/E) test, with a varying number of questions, graded automatically

Open-ended: An test consisting of several open-ended questions, to be reviewed by a human instructor

Treasure hunt: Complete a series of tasks interacting with the "real world," your goal being to determine a set answer (for example, compile a program which will produce an exact predictable result), graded automatically

Practical exercise: A single random challenge (for example, build a webpage and publish it online), relevant to the course material and judged by a human instructor

Other: I'm open to suggestions =)

[CaveMan]

i prefer practical, how ever that has changed ALOT in the last 2 years because the teacher doesn't mark anything i do...

treasure hunt sounds fun aswell, but i think i would fail miserably...

so you gotta make sure u get marked (or u do marking)

[Voiceoftruth]

Treausre hunt FTW ^_^

[Masterpyro]

muliple choice for me but i would also like it to be graded by humans to check for other answers that work.

[Loki]

Treasure hunts are awesome!!!!! 8)

[VaKo]

It really depends on what your main priority is with this thing. And also how much man power your whilling to invest in this project. If the aim is to take n00bs and create hackers from them, then practical tests & treasure hunts are the way to go, but have been done many times before.

But if the aim is more to provide a solid base in general computing from which can be built a hacker, a programmer or a web dev for instance. Then I would suggest starting with a series of multiple choice questions, move on to more open ended questions as the student progresses and eventually progress to practical sessions. This way you can establish a solid base which will allow the student to develop towards the areas they show apptitude in.

The hacking games have been done many times though, so I would avoid this if your planning to produce a more open ended learning enviroment, and not something that just funnels people into being 1337 hax0rs.