Ruby and Rails workshops for women

From DevchixWiki

Jump to: navigation, search

Materials from these workshops are published as part of the RailsBridge Open Workshops Project

Logistics

Location: San Francisco Bay Area

Registration: http://www.meetup.com/sfruby/calendar

Next workshop: May 21st and 22nd, 2010.

Schedule: May 21st - Friday night - mixer and install Ruby/Rails on everyone's laptop. Mandatory for participation in Saturday's workshop.

May 22nd - Saturday daytime - workshop

Registration:

  • Limit TBD.
  • Cost: free.
  • Childcare available if noted with registration.

Registration policy: Men are welcome as participants if they come with a woman who's learning Ruby. She registers and lists him as her guest. This will encourage the guys of the SF Ruby Meetup to think of friends they have who might want to learn. This is Women 2.0's policy for their events and has worked well for them.

Schedule

  • 9:30 registration coffee/tea
  • 10am-10:20 large group presentation: why we're doing this workshop, highlights of women in computing, short history of Ruby and Rails, what each is good for and the relationship between them, what participants can expect from the workshop (do we want anything of them after they leave?)
  • 10:30-11:20 session 1
  • 11:30-12:20 session 2
  • 12:30-1:30 lunch
  • 1:30-2:20 session 3
  • 2:30-3:20 session 4
  • 3:30-4pm large group wrap up

We encourage both participants and volunteers to submit feedback in a survey after the event.

Content

Notes

  • Workshop Advice
    • Have one volunteer be a runner to remind people when it's 10 minutes until the next break. (This worked really well.)
    • Make sure all of the projectors have Mac adaptors
    • Handouts with all of the code that people need to type
    • Tell people at the beginning that the slides are online
    • Have a volunteer leader, make sure they are distributed evenly
    • Advertise that the Friday night setup is required, send notes out 1 week ahead of time, so people can get started ahead of time
    • USB keys and/or DVDs with the big stuff like XCode
  • Workshop Notes from 5/21 NYC session
    • Start with live coding - watch and type along, don't even use slides. make sure students & teachers irb prompts display line numbers, so we can say go to line 32
    • Go into IRB to practice basic concepts first, don't discuss what agile and a variable is in the abstract right away. Learning by doing first and talking later worked better.
    • At the very beginning, show a designed version of app so people can recognize it as finished product like other web sites they see: screenshots are on Sarah Allan's site.
    • Have TAs wear different badge colors so they can recognize each other.
    • Discuss rubyisms where appropriate. use code to show elegance & readability of ruby vs other languages: each vs (for i; i = "lame"; i ++)
    • Ask students to discuss what they learned, what they thought of it, at end of the day. As beginning of wrap-up session or just before it.
Retrieved from "http://www.wiki.devchix.com/index.php?title=Ruby_and_Rails_workshops_for_women"
Personal tools