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Ewan Klein edited this page Aug 22, 2019 · 24 revisions

Prewired Workshops

Motivation

Although the main ethos of Prewired is to support attendees in developing their own projects, it can also be useful to give them more structured input in the form of short workshops. There are a number of reasons for doing this:

  • stretching the kids' capacities and providing a new focus for their work (we still have a few attendees who default to playing shoot-em-up games);
  • they don't know what they don't know -- most of them could benefit from improving their coding skills in one area or another and there are always new technologies to learn;
  • it can be fun for mentors to get more involved in this way.

How

Basic approach:

  • short presentations (10-20 mins) which act as a lead-in to activities by the workshop participants [MUST]
  • clear expectations of participants' prior knowledge of topic and some rough idea of learning outcomes [MUST]
  • participant activities should be graded in difficulty (start easy, build up to something challenging) [MAY]
  • written materials (ideally kept on GitHub/GitLab):
    • for participants [MUST]
    • for other mentors and as something to build on for future iterations [MAY]
  • follow-on activities that workshop participants can carry on with in regular evening sessions [MUST]

In addition, we might want to have something like: feedback forms after each workshop; certificates of completion; target projects that could be worked on over a course of weeks and demo-ed.

For every workshop there should be at least one mentor who takes ownership of defining the topic, delivering the workshop itself, producing learning materials and managing follow-up activities. Of course, this could be done with a team but one person needs to take overall responsibility.

Topics

Preliminary list of topics...

Games

Robotics

  • self-balancing mobile robots

Electronics 101

Networking

Building a computer from basic components

Intro to Linux / be your own sysadmin

Python

Beginner

  • How to get started e.g., programming micro:bits.
  • Simple intro to basic syntax; loops; how and when to write functions -- ideally run this via JupyterHub

Post-beginner

  • Classes
  • List comprehension
  • Documenting code
  • ...

Internet of Things

HTML, CSS, Javascript

  • HTML elements; write your basic page and put it on a server
  • Add some CSS
  • Try to write a consistent set of pages (menus, consistent headers) and bang your head in frustration; learn a simple framework (which one?)
  • Execute JS in the browser

Data Visualisation and Maps

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