I have another challenge for you - has anyone experienced experiential training? Probably the best-known example would be outdoor ropes courses where the participants are swinging through the trees, doing a "trust fall", etc. Jerry Weinberg uses an experiential approach to teach leadership skills in software organizations (in his Problem-Solving Leadership course). It's similar to role-playing, but the participants are generally encouraged to use their own style rather than pretending to be someone else. It involves physical interactions like building a house of cards, solving puzzles (from a kit, not on paper), etc. - never anything using seminar-style seating.
I love the experiential approach to doing exercises. It translates pretty well to teaching leadership skills. But I'm struggling with how to incorporate the approach into technical training. Has anyone seen this done before for something as technical as perl training? I've thought about having people get up and take on the role of different perl operators, and pass data back and forth or something. But I haven't quite worked it out. By way of introduction, my consulting practice is focused on software quality. I'm carving out a niche teaching people how to use scripting languages in a software test environment. I'm now developing my first full-day tutorial on using perl for testing. I'm also working on an open source stress test tool that's written in perl, and I'll use it in several of my presentations. After taking Jerry's Problem-Solving Leadership course and seeing how it was so much a richer experience than the typical PowerPoint training (there's no projector in the room at all, no computers), I just have to try to incorporate some of that technique into my training. BTW, I'm signed up to take his next course, Change Shop, but unfortunately Jerry isn't going to do these courses any more after this one (his colleagues apparently do similar things, though). -- Danny Faught Tejas Software Consulting http://www.tejasconsulting.com
