Hi everyone, I've taught two workshops recently where we run into the same issue with the shell lesson and I would like to know your thoughts about it. The shell lesson is different from the other ones in the sense that you find a very broad spectrum of student skills: a big portion of the class knows at least a handful of commands, compared to say VC, where people either know the 10-ish basic commands to work with a repo, or know nothing at all. (I'm talking all the time of novice level.)
Both workshops had low attendance (~20), in one case because it was closed, in the other we don't know yet why. With low attendance, it's easy to run in a situation where half of the class is very bored during the first three or four chapters of the shell lesson (I found that loops wake up most people again.) This puts the whole group in the wrong mood, which sometimes is hard to recover from. Pre-assesment surveys are not very helpful here, because you can't split such small groups. Do you have any ideas on how to fix this? I like the shell lesson and it had worked well for all-novices groups, but I wonder if someone tried to adapt to the situation described above by shortening the lesson up or maybe making a more-than-novice-but-less-than-intermediate hybrid. Best, Ivan _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
