Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind

> On 28 Oct 2015, at 21:49, Sam Penrose wrote: > > I wonder if it is helpful in effect to reverse the polarity of the > identification, to say: > > Programmers spend their time getting complex systems to play nicely, > which is a process of repeatedly getting stuck, then

Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind

On 2015-10-30 5:14 PM, Steve Haddock wrote: ...I think people are so desperate for training that it would be hard to convince them *not* to sign up for an upcoming workshop even if it is not a perfect fit. If there is no fixed date for the hypothetical future workshop, they would not want to

Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind

I think this thread is diverging from the important original topic: how to solve the problem of beginners in an intermediate class, or more broadly, the disparity between experience levels in any given class. Regarding that subject, I think people are so desperate for training that it would

Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind

On Thu, Oct 29, 2015, at 02:28 PM, Karin Lagesen wrote: > > ...is there some statistics on this? I think that errors would be a lot > less scary if we could show how much of their time even those that code > for a living spend on debugging their code. > Poking around on

Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind

On 10/29/2015 7:40 AM, Matthew Gidden wrote: A big +1 for explicitly introducing failure during the learning process. I recently taught a course for people brand new to programming. There were some explicit failures I added to some lessons, and I still underestimated just how uncomfortable they

Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind

For all those interested, I finished a first version of the blog post on the etherpad. Feel free to dial over and provide feedback or make additions. I'd then convert this to a PR to the SWC site repo. Best, Peter On 10/28/2015 09:59 AM, Greg Wilson wrote: Hi everyone, The simplest way to

Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind

One of the things that I always emphasize before and during the workshop is that my aim is not to teach them to be programmers, but to make it less scary if and when they do decide to learn things more in depth. My main goal is to demystify programming. That way, it becomes less about

Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind

Dundee From: Discuss <discuss-boun...@lists.software-carpentry.org> on behalf of Karin Lagesen <karin.lage...@gmail.com> Sent: 28 October 2015 20:11 To: discuss@lists.software-carpentry.org Subject: Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind One of the things that I always emphasize

Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind

t; Karin Lagesen <karin.lage...@gmail.com> > Sent: 28 October 2015 20:11 > To: discuss@lists.software-carpentry.org > Subject: Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind > > One of the things that I always emphasize before and during the workshop > is that my aim is not to teach the

Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind

From: Discuss <discuss-boun...@lists.software-carpentry.org> on behalf of Karin Lagesen <karin.lage...@gmail.com> Sent: 28 October 2015 20:11 To: discuss@lists.software-carpentry.org Subject: Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind One of the things that I always emphasize befor

Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind

From: Karin Lagesen <karin.lage...@gmail.com> Sent: 28 October 2015 20:54 To: Sam Penrose; David Martin (Staff) Cc: discuss@lists.software-carpentry.org Subject: Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind +1000 to this. On that note, I always congratulate people when they get their first error m

Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind

Hi everyone, The simplest way to start might be to throw stuff into this Etherpad: http://pad.software-carpentry.org/pulling-along-those-behind Cheers, Greg ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.software-carpentry.org

Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind

Hi, Mike Jackson here developed a set of scripts that capture the history of your bash screen and publishes it on a web site so that students/helpers have a chance to see what they missed while resolving a problem and now has scrolled off the screen. It's not ideal but it does provide

Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind

Hi Peter, > Could you share these scripts? Please check https://github.com/swcarpentry/site/pull/1124/files#diff-9e17f2fd404c84648654a4fc54a9a2ecR71 . We are going to publish it this week. > I'd like to see if they'd capture a nano screen etc > (I presume not, but I'd like to try them anyhow).

Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind

Hi Peter, If there are more people falling behind than you have helpers to handle, then I'd just slow down. I'd (reluctantly) rather bore those who don't want a slower pace, than confuse those do. cheers, mike Quoting Peter Steinbach on Tue, 27 Oct 2015 11:39:01

Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind

Hi April, thanks for your insights. As a matter of fact, in my case the local organizers were very forthcoming and implemented a pre-assessment form before the workshop. Still, I had the feeling during the workshop that this pre-assessment only covered the tip of the iceberg (as expected).

Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind

On 27 October 2015 at 16:27, C. Titus Brown wrote: > Hi Amanda et al., > > thanks, this is a nice discussion! > > I try to distinguish between "zero entry" and more advanced workshops > as clearly as possible, but of course problems happen in both directions > for the

Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind

I stretch the skill-level bracket of all my workshops by leaning heavily on tiered challenge problems; I break for problems regularly (every 30 minutes or so, giving those really struggling a chance to catch up), and set 'baseline' problems (that everyone is expected to solve) and 'stretch' goals

Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind

One thing that I've found is that students who are behind sometimes give up trying to type along and just read along with the lesson notes. While it's not the ideal outcome, it may be the best one for some fraction of students, and this makes it easier for those students to reference those notes

Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind

I actually had a similar problem, but with an intro workshop that I had already pared down considerably because I knew the learners were skewed towards *very* beginners. Even with the simplified material, I had a handful of people who couldn't keep up, people who had to hover a single finger back

Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind

Hi Amanda et al., thanks, this is a nice discussion! I try to distinguish between "zero entry" and more advanced workshops as clearly as possible, but of course problems happen in both directions for the advanced workshops - too advanced, and too beginner. One strategy that (I think) Greg

Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind

Hello everybody, since this is my first post, let me introduce myself: I'm a research fellow at university of Bologna (Italy) and a "temporary" professor teaching Python programming in a Bioinformatics Master's degree course. I attended Greg's SWC "train the trainers" workshop in London 3 weeks

Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind

Hi Peter et al. It is great to hear everyone’s thoughts. I would suggest a multi-prongged approach: I always post a “Lesson plan” master notebook to the class repository. This has my lesson plan in it (so basically everything I plan on typing minus the extemporaneous stuff). I point people to

Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind

Hi all, I'm not a SWC instructor but will be applying for the the group training soon. I share this concern. Here are a few things I've found helpful that hopefully carry over from my different teaching experience: 1. offering exercises that can be completed at various levels ("Write a

Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind

On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 04:33:37PM +, Noam Ross wrote: > One thing that I've found is that students who are behind sometimes give up > trying to type along and just read along with the lesson notes. While it's > not the ideal outcome, it may be the best one for some fraction of > students,

Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind

If anyone would like to summarize the discussion in a blog post (which we could then include in instructor training), I'd be very grateful, and so would future generations of instructors. Cheers, Greg ___ Discuss mailing list

Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind

When teaching Python, I have a keyboard shortcut set up to push my live-coding notebook to a repository on github. At the beginning of the lesson I post the link to the etherpad and let learners know that this is a good tab to keep open for when they want to see cells I've long since scrolled

Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind

Great discussion all! I second Greg's motion - would be great to have this summarized and archived as a resource for future use. Christina On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 4:38 PM, David Dotson wrote: > When teaching Python, I have a keyboard shortcut set up to push my > live-coding

Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind

-carpentry.org] On Behalf Of Greg Wilson Sent: 27 October 2015 11:08 PM To: discuss@lists.software-carpentry.org Subject: Re: [Discuss] pulling along those behind If anyone would like to summarize the discussion in a blog post (which we could then include in instructor training), I'd be very grateful, and so