workshops

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.