Goals of RailsBridge¶
- Get excited about programming
- Get these people into Ruby community --> that's why breaks and happy hour built into schedule
- Provide insights on your experiences with Rails in parallel with curriculum
Groups¶
Groups of less than 5
For true beginners, larger group can be good - less likely to ask questions, so any question that's asked is likely to help multiple people
Can ask teachers what level/background of students they want to work with
Can be good to group all Windows machines
Response Rate¶
Historically half of RSVPs show up
Recently, workshops ask students to fill out survey ahead of time - helps with attendance rate
Free drink tickets for volunteers
On Childcare¶
Have always tried to offer childcare (usually noone takes up on it but sometimes they do)
Nursing space surprisingly popular
Schedule¶
Breaks, lunch, and afterparties are great for talking to people about where to go after this
Have someone come around w/ reminder to take break
Windows¶
Rails runs much more slowly on Windows
Syntax coloring is in installfest
Can be good to group all Windows users
Have considered setting up EC2 or other instances
Teaching¶
TAs/Teachers complementary skillsets, not hierarchical. Can pair up experienced & less so
Ask your students why they're there and what they want out of the day
Can share Google Doc beforehand -- plop URLs for copy/paste, etc.
Ways to gauge if students are following. Every 20-30 minutes go around the room, ask everyone what 1 thing they learned
Curriculum¶
Take tangents your students are interested in, feel free to deviate or skip
Goal is to get them interested, not learn by rote
Maybe skip ri and docs
Some students say learning how to Google error messages was most useful part of course
MVC + Looking at views files - useful for people experienced in HTML or any other language, less so for others
Deploying to Heroku vs. not: lots of hassle, but so far the decision has been that it's worthwhile for the satisfaction and understanding of full cycle
Instead of "Clean Up Links On The Topics List", esp. for CSS people, can be good to work on UI
Followup¶
Existing feedback for workshop improvement
There's a call for success stories -- send them in if you know!
Suggestion 1: Share survey results from post-workshop followup (Emily will do this for next one)
Suggestion 2: "What happened to you?" survey (Michelle will do this for the July workshop)