Community Data Science Workshops (Spring 2014)/Reflections: Difference between revisions

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 [[Benjamin Mako Hill]] gave all three of the two-hour morning lectures. All of the lectures involved the teacher working through material in the interactive Python interpreter shown on a projector with students following along in a Python interpretor on their own computers. In general, the lectures were rated well received by students.
-Concern with the lectures include the feeling that:
+Concern with the lectures include feedback that:
-* Two hours of straight lecture of difficult material was too long
+* Two hours of straight lecture of difficult material was long and difficult to sit through.
-* If students got lost, it could be very hard to catch up given how the interactive session tended to build on earlier steps.
+* If students became lost, it could be very hard to catch up given how the interactive Python session tended to build on earlier steps and assume the presense of variables or particular states.
-* There were often more mentors than needed in the morning sessions meaning that many mentors were idle.
+* There were often more mentors than really needed in the morning sessions meaning that many mentors were often idle.
-* As the lectures progressed and the work and tasks became more complex, working in the interactive interpreter become increasingly difficult — particularly for very long programs.
+* As the lectures progressed and the work and tasks became more complex, working in the interactive interpreter become increasingly difficult — particularly for long for loops or deeply nested blocks of codes.
-To address these concerns, we've suggested the following changes:
+To address these concerns, we are planning the following changes to how we run these sessions in the future:
-* Break up the lecture into at least two parts. Between those parts, include a small (10-15 minute) long exercise. This will both break things up, allow mentors to be of more help, and give students who fell behind a chance to catch up. It will also allow students to grab coffee and such.
+* Breaking up the lecture into at least two parts. Between those parts, we will try include a small (~10-15 minute long) exercise. This will both break things up, allow mentors to be of more help during the sssions, and give students who fell behind a chance to catch up. It will also allow students to grab coffee or use the bathroom if they need to.
-* Record the lectures so that students can catch up after the fact.
+* Record the lectures so that students can catch up after the sessions. We did not do this but should have.
-* Arrange for some mentors to arrive after noon if they'd prefer.
+* Arrange for some mentors to arrive after noon if they would prefer.
-* Upload not only the outline, but examples of all of the code, that we will run interactively.
+* Upload not only the outline, but examples of all of the code we'll use as part of the lectures.
-* Switch into writing code in files and running those files much earlier — perhaps as soon as we hit more than 2-3 lines in a for loop in Session 1. This might make writing these loops useful in that they can be reused by students and will introduce the idea of writing and running code in a file (as opposed to a REPL environment) much earlier.
+* Switch into writing code in separate files and running those files much earlier — perhaps as soon as we hit more than 2-3 lines in a `for` loop in Session 1.
 === Projects ===