Ramping Up Apprentices
While going through my notes, I just rediscovered a bunch of text files which I used to ramp up apprentices a couple of years back. It's a mix of coding katas, general advice and English lesson (I wrote the tasks mostly in English to get the German-speaking apprentices used to understanding that language they only knew from school)
The context here is that apprentices start with absolutely zero professional programming languages. The tasks were aimed at getting all apprentices to the same level - some quicker, some slower, depending on their previous self-taught knowledge, and to teach them some debugging, abstraction and other skills before they would actually touch production code. Depending on the apprentice, these tasks kept them busy between 2 weeks and 2 months. I pasted the texts online unedited, including all typos and occasional Germanness in between. I only removed some confidential information about the company in which context I was using these.
Here they are: