annalaise / makers-skills-workshops

Skills Workshop Exercises at Maker's Academy

Skills Workshops

All Skills Workshops held at Makers Academy.

What are Skills Workshops?

Whole-cohort activities that take 1 - 1.5 hours. Each trains a specific skill, while addressing certain concepts along the way.

How do I run them?

Instructions for running any Skills Workshop are available as INSTRUCTIONS.md in each workshop directory. Skills Workshops are split into three parts: a Starter, Main, and Plenary.

Starter

In the Starter, the coach:

• Introduces the headline of the workshop, tying to previous workshops if possible
• Assesses how confident the cohort feels in each of the three upcoming Learning Objectives for the workshop
• Demonstrates whatever is required to get to the Main.

Starters generally last for 15 - 20 minutes.

Tips for effective Starters

• Facilitate where possible. That is; don't just talk, constantly ask questions of the cohort to help you demo code/processes.
• Feel free to make mistakes and ask students to prompt you to move forward.
• An easy way to check student confidence in a Learning Objective is to ask them to give you 'thumbs': 100% up means 'I can definitely do that', 100% down means 'no idea what that means', and somewhere in the middle is 'maybe'.
• Keep it really tight. Give students enough, but a Starter is not a lecture.

Main

In the Main, students work on an extended activity. Instructions for students are found in the README.md of each workshop.

In the Main, the coach:

• Sets a time limit for students to regather for the Plenary.
• Checks with students to motivate them to solve problems, but doesn't solve them.
• Ensures effective pairing is happening.

Mains generally last for 30 - 45 minutes.

Tips for effective Mains

• Students forget when they started a task. So it's better to say 'regather at 11' than to say 'you have half an hour'
• If students are regularly running over time, set a big, noticeable timer on-screen. Google has one.
• Few students complete the Main activity. This is intended and good: students should always feel under 'time pressure' during a Main.

Plenary

In the Plenary, students demonstrate their solutions to the Main activity. The coach:

• Facilitates discussion and points out key areas for improvement. Ideally, these key areas are linked to the week's outcomes.
• Returns to the Learning Objectives and re-assesses cohort confidence.
• OPTIONAL Gathers feedback on the workshop.

Plenaries generally last for 15 - 25 minutes.

Tips for effective Plenaries

• Reiterate things. It's generally better to pick out one key problem three times than three problems once.
• Use a randomiser to randomly choose who demos their code: otherwise, only the most confident people in the cohort will volunteer. Using a randomiser ensures the heat is off you as a coach.
• Point out to students that their confidence in these topics has risen, and that this is the key point of the workshop.
• One effective way to encourage learner reflection is to give students post-it notes on the way out of the workshop, and to write 1 - 3 things they picked up from this workshop on it. They can stick it on the door on the way out and you can get a sense of how the workshop went.

Adding more Workshops

When adding workshops, please follow the existing structures so everything stays lovely and consistent:

• Workshops have a Starter, Main, and Plenary
• Instructions for delivering the Workshop are in an INSTRUCTIONS.md
• Student guidance for the Main activity are in a README.md
• The plenary branch exclusively contains material relevant to running the Plenary (i.e. usually a model completed Main)
• Workshops are named skill_<number> where <number> indicates the order the workshop should be given in the sequence of similar workshops