Workshop Advice
From DevchixWiki
Recommendations on the workshop structure and pacing from Sarah Allen's conversation with Antun Karlovac, a professional trainer
45 minute sessions are pretty standard and work well, with a 5 minute break in between Important: tell people the schedule in advance. If they know they will get a break it will help them focus People have a hard time paying attention even if they want to, you can stretch it to an hour if you need to, but no longer. Good to have the schedule written on the whiteboard, and remind people 10 mins before the break.
Within each session
- tell students what we will do and why we will do it (2 minutes)
- demonstrate the command or code and explain it (3-8 minutes) consider telling them what might go wrong, and how to recover, other options that will be available, hand-outs can be helpful
- students re-create it on their own machines (30-40 mins), typically there will be questions that you want to answer for the whole class during the time
- always make it simpler than you think it needs to be
- it is tempting to think that people will think they won't be interested because it is too simple, but when people are learning they need it to be simple
- people will screw up their environment -- you can save this by having pre-created stuff for every check point on the file system
He recommends spending a whole session just on the rails command for beginners to let them know everything that is going on. Maybe have a listing of the generated files on a hand-out. Tell them that everything is in that directory and they can simply delete it and start over, maybe tell them some of the options they could use (Rails version, database) even if we won't use them for the class. "When they see you poke around the files, they will be more comfortable exploring on their own."
