[Events] Finding time for projects in Boston Python Workshop-style workshops

[Greg Ward]

On 27 March 2013, Julia Evans said:
> One thing that we've found is that the Saturday lecture on lists &
> dictionaries & modules takes a fairly long time -- it's been really
> participatory and people ask a lot of great questions and are really
> engaged, but then it doesn't leave very much time for working on projects.
> (also, the first time our power went out, which didn't help :))

Specifically, the canonical BPW schedule (which we slavishly copied)
says this:

  Saturday morning, 10am-noon: a 2 hour lecture-based introduction to
                               the language

The first time we did this, we split it so Julia did the first hour
(review, lists, loops) and I did the second hour (dictionaries,
modules, std lib). Unfortunately the first "hour" took a smidge under
two hours, so we broke for lunch early. Then I took over after lunch
to do the 11am-12pm lecture, and it took about 1.5 hours.

Curiously, I've seen Jessica McKellar deliver basically the same
material at a Software Carpentry workshop here back in January, and it
didn't seem like she went too fast. So it must be possible to pull
this off in two hours, but we didn't manage. What's the trick? Just
practice more?

       Greg
-- 
Greg Ward                            http://www.gerg.ca
<greg at gerg.ca>                       @gergdotca