When I ran YouthComputing, I realized that real-time tech “workshops” didn’t work. There are a couple of reasons for this:

  • Unequal skillsets
    • Someone will always be confused. Someone will always be bored.
    • I once ran a tech workshop where one person didn’t know how to type. Needless to say they didn’t learn much.
  • Unexpected problems
    • Regardless of the scale, problems are inevitable
    • Wifi doesn’t work, not enough seats, AV system doesnt work, etc
  • Need an adaptable teacher
    • This is a VERY hard skill to search for. As the topic becomes more complex, you will need technical people to become adaptable teachers—which doesn’t work well

I used to think that these problems were only characteristic of YouthComputing, but after coming to Amazon reMARS I’ve realized that even giants face the same issues (actually, I think YC does better workshops than AWS).

I am more in favor of prerecorded + edited tutorials with an easy to access forum of sorts. The key is to think of the write user flow for the forum.

Solving the first problem

A couple of years ago we were thinking of Central to solve the first problem. I think it was out of our scope as a team at the time, but I honestly thing there is still a good need for it.