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Running Engaging Workshops for Beginners

A workshop to level up your workshops

First Thoughts

What do you think when you walk into a workshop room?
  • Who is this?
  • Am I qualified for this? Is this valuable for me?
  • What do I do if I have questions?
  • What are they going to talk about?
  • I wonder what’s for dinner…
Make the environment welcoming
  • My name is Arielle. I'm a developer advocate engineer at Spotify and a former serial hacker in the North American hackathon circuit.
  • This is an interactive workshop. If you see a coloured slide, follow the instructions.
  • I will answer questions at the end, but please raise your hand if you have a burning question!

Let's Talk About Workshops

What makes a hackathon workshop different?
  • 30-60 minutes
  • Motivation to “complete” a project
  • 24-48 hour timeline
  • Abundance of mentorship
  • Learning and experimenting mindset
Hackathon Tips
  • Attendees should walk away with something that works
  • Make yourself available after the workshop
  • Provide inspiration for projects
  • Give some possible “Next steps”
Teaching Guidelines
  • Present with all learning types in mind (visual, auditory, learn by doing)
  • Have real-time mentorship available
  • Offer pauses

Designing for Beginners

Extract away technical details

Roadbumps for Beginners
  • “This is way over my head”
  • Development environment setup
  • Small technical errors
  • Uninspiring content
"This is way over my head"
  • Scoping Your Workshop
    • Too broad: "Front end web development", "iOS"
    • Scoped and actionable: “Make a static personal website with Github Pages”, “Learn about audio analysis with the Spotify API”, “Read realtime data from Twitter in Python”
  • Minimum Viable Workshop Topic
    • Limited prior knowledge
    • Attendees can walk away with something that works
    • Room for further exploration
  • Start Non-Technical
Development environment setup
  • Common problems:
    • (Using TextEdit) “Why isn’t my code coloured like yours?”
    • “How do I open Terminal?”
    • “It says npm: command not found”
    • “How do I do that on Windows?”
  • Keep it environment-agnostic
  • Example environments
    • Glitch (front end or Node)
    • Cloud9 (full ubuntu environment)
    • Codepen
    • JSFiddle
    • GitHub (if your audience already has accounts & knows Git)
Small technical errors
  • Provide a working foundation
    • If you're building from scratch with no reference point, small errors are inevitable. They will demotivate your attendees.
  • Good Templates
    • Offer inspiration (ie. a README with things to try)
    • Documented (comments, links to resources, highlights important parts)
    • Hackable (change something small and see different results)
    • Open (accessible during and after event, open-source)
  • Interactive: https://hackcon.glitch.me
    • “Remix” the project. Follow the instructions in the README!
Uninspiring content
  • Make it interactive
  • Focus on exploring what you can do
    • If beginners are motivated to create something, they learn the details of how to do it as a side effect.

Your Workshop Template Pack

Happy Workshopping! If you have questions, open a Github issue on the template pack or tweet @imariari.