Curriculum Creation

Making the materials

• Use our example workshop template as a starting guide for formatting and materials to include: slides, follow-up email, marketing copy.
• Keep slides as visual as possible, not text-based. The majority of the slide should be taken up by either a short code snippet, a diagram, a screenshot, or in rare cases, a short list. Since you are teaching in person, you will be providing the textual narration needed, so you needn’t overwhelm the slides with text. As a compromise, you could add a button to your slides for people to toggle the text/notes on after, while they’re reviewing at home.
• Try to use visual, fun, local examples in your slides, in-class examples, and exercises, so that the audience has something to connect to. Animals, childhood loves, sports teams, TV shows. Anything “retro” works great, because everyone loves to get nostalgic.
• For hands-on workshops, make the exercises for each concept build from simple to complex. When in doubt, start with something you’d almost consider “too simple” - i.e. something that is 95% the same as a snippet that’s already in the slides. Then add additional exercises or marked “bonus” sections in an exercise. It’s important to communicate to students that they aren’t expected to finish all the exercises, but it’s also important to have enough exercises so that the more advanced students feel challenged.
• If you plan to do any live coding to demonstrate a concept, prepare it ahead of time. Print it out so you can reference it during the workshop, but try to roughly memorize what it is you’re going to do. Or, prepare a file with parts commented out, if that’s less error prone for you. Just do not expect to be able to live code and come up with a great example of a concept on the spot. Live coding is hard enough.

Creating Exercises

• If the student is meant to start with some code instead of write from scratch, there should be a clear link to that and explicit instruction to "save file into your project folder".
• The first step should just be there to make sure that the student is set up in the environment and has got the most basic thing working. For example, they might be instructed to change the value of a string and reload.
• The subsequent steps should ramp up in difficulty.
  • To make it easier for students, you can link to relevant documentation, like: "Write the form data to a text file using fs.readFile" You can also make it more clear by saying where they should be making a change, like "in the makeBody function, do X."
  • You can also suggest that they check the slides like "for a reminder of how to use X, check slides Y-Z".
  • The degree of hints that you give really depend on what it is you're trying to make sure they learn, but I think we aim towards providing more hints than less in our curriculum, because we want to reduce confusion while still encouraging learning.
  • The exercise should conclude with “Bonus” steps, for the more advanced students that find themselves with more time.

Delivering the materials

• Practice your materials. That doesn’t mean you need to say them aloud and make a mini audience of stuffed animals, but you should at least be skimming through your slides and going over what you’d say in your head. What you’re trying to figure out by practicing is whether there are any parts that don’t jive - if there’s an awkward transition, or something that needs a different example, or concepts out of order - and then fix the issue by figuring out the explanation in your head or changing the slides. Ideally, you feel comfortable enough with the material and it flows well enough that you don’t feel like you need to memorize it, you can simply follow along with the story outlined by your slides.
• You can record speaker notes as a tool while practicing your content, but it doesn’t usually work well to actually reference notes while presenting. If you’re looking at notes while teaching, your students won’t feel like you’re connecting with them and will feel less engaged. You want to be looking at them at all times, when possible. Sure, you might miss covering some things if you don’t reference your notes, but it’s better to do that than to lose your audience entirely.
• Speak with energy and enthusiasm in your voice. If you sound bored or tired, then your audience will pick that up from. If you sound excited, then your audience will think they should be excited too. This is particularly important when you’re teaching technical material over long periods of time, because it is easy for your audience to drift away. You have to work extra hard to keep them engaged.