Hi All, > On 04 Oct 2016, at 01:13, Bennet Fauber <[email protected]> wrote: > > For that last mentioned thought, there are two cases in point that > have come up in my experience, a) someone who signs up because they > are maybe a little shaky on the morning's Python topics, but are > really looking forward to Functions, Errors and Exceptions, Defensive > Programming, and Debugging, and then comes away disappointed when > those don't get covered; b) the *verse (inverse, obverse, converse, or > reverse) of that, three of four people really are rank beginners, but > most of the other participants are in case a), so the instructor > shorts the early topics to be sure to have time for the more advanced > ones, and the beginners are at sea after about 30 minutes. I believe > I've seen both here.
This has been exactly my experience as well. We always state that course participants should have some previous experience of computing: "The target student will know a little bit of command line/programmatic computer usage, but not consider themselves an expert. The target student will have written a for loop in some language before, but will not know what Git is (or at least not be very comfortable with advanced Git usage).” In my experience, this has proven to be open to interpretation by people considering whether to register for the workshop, and I have always found myself struggling to cover material adequately to satisfy every student. For what it’s worth, though, this large range of prior experience levels only really applies to shell and programming, in my experience. Not so much to git, where we might have some people who are familiar with the basic clone/add/commit/push/pull workflow, but not much beyond. I haven’t yet found any attendees who already have a strong mental model of how git really works. We are now coming up with a plan for an intermediate workshop, which would still cover shell, Python, and version control in its core, but begin with a day of optional sessions covering the basics of shell and Python, so that we can be more confident when delving into some of the more intermediate stuff in the subsequent days/sessions. Cheers, T
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