Over the course of the past two school years, my colleague Rob Biedenharn and I have been working with Tom Brinkmann's students at Little Miami High School, attempting to teach them Web development using Ruby on Rails to aid in their participation in Business Professionals of America competitions and to provide them with skills very much in demand locally.
We provided the students all the usual links to facilitate self-guided learning on Windows PCs but it quickly became evident that we were facing two challenges: