[Events] Feedback from training session

[Karen Rustad]

Hey all,

I feel a little weird responding, since I'm not an instructor for this
weekend. It's not my sweat going into making this event happen. I'm on the
other bloody side of the country. But I'm on this list, I provided the
original Railsbridge braindump, and Asheesh asked for my input, having come
to programming "late in life" and having benefited from these sorts of
workshops and tutorials.

Like, Rails Outreach for Women is a thing that exists. The Railsbridge folks
have taught hundreds of n00bs successfully. And, yes, they teach a
practical, integrated approach. It doesn't teach you the details on all the
tools it touches, but they walk you through enough to get the tutorial done
and it teaches you enough to engender familiarity and confidence--which,
honestly, is probably the most important thing a one-day workshop could ever
hope to accomplish.

I mean, who is your target market with this workshop? Part of why
Railsbridge works, I suspect, is a lot of the attendees are women who work
in the tech industry in nontechnical functions. A contextful approach is
*exactly* what they need, far more than perfect syntax or big-O notation,
because it's that that allows them to understand what the engineers they
work with are rambling about, learn more about these topics, and contribute
usefully to that conversation. If all the attendees were college sophomores
or otherwise in a place in their lives where theory makes more sense,
perhaps Railsbridge wouldn't be the best approach. I don't know.

But even *then*... Going into my no-longer-estranged relationship with
programming here would result in far too long an email. I've condensed my
take on things here:
http://www.littlegreenriver.com/2011/03/04/how-to-teach-programming-shy-practical-people-edition/
Suffice it to say, I personally am not interested or motivated by toy
programs, the sorts of things that all the usual CS courses and tutorials
only ever taught. What it took for me to really, truly want to be (and begin
self-identifying as) a coder was a 100% contextful approach: here is a web
app idea, here are the tools we're using to build it, here's some steps and
a ton of empathetic, intelligent mentorship; go! It was only then that this
whole coding business had a *point*.

On that second point I can only speak to my own motivations and interests.
Obviously lots of people like pure CS--if they didn't, there wouldn't be CS
majors! And I do appreciate CS theory to a certain degree. But, like. As it
stands, there's already a zillion traditional-CS-course-style tutorials for
people with this set of interests, "Think Like a Computer Scientist" et al.
But I suspect that there might just be other shy, engineer-brained,
GUI-happy people like me, and, if so, there's just *so* fewer resources for
us.

--
Karen Rustad
Miss "Most Emotive Commit Messages" 2010, UC Berkeley IOLab


On Thu, Mar 3, 2011 at 9:48 PM, Christine Spang <spang at mit.edu> wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 03, 2011 at 10:09:08PM -0500, Jessica McKellar wrote:
> > One possibility for retaining the web app as a project would be modifying
> > the setup so that it is locally hosted and doesn't use git, and have both
> > the setup and the project work happen on Saturday. That way only people
> who
> > want to handle the setup will do it. I don't know if 1.5 days is enough
> time
> > to make these modifications. Asheesh, what do you think about this idea?
>
> Can't we just give people the option to not do the setup for
> the web app on Friday night if they think it's too crazy?
> We can say that "as long as you have at least ColorWall
> set up, you're good to go". But people will still be able to
> go for the web app if they get through the first parts very
> quickly and are eager for more.
>
> It would be a shame to ditch the web app because: (a) it's
> pretty cool, (b) we advertised it, (c) it worked for
> Railsbridge and that was the inspiration for this event, (d)
> we've done a lot of prep work for it.
>
> If things don't work out as well as we hope, there's always
> the opportunity to iterate for next time.
>
> That said, I don't think it's good for the overall event to
> have people teaching things that they don't want to teach
> (or feeling resentful for other reasons).  Whatever we're
> going to do, we should agree on it.
>
> Christine
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> Events at lists.openhatch.org
> http://lists.openhatch.org/mailman/listinfo/events
>
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