NodeSchool Workshop
Today I helped mentor two sessions of NodeSchool.io workshops, Javascripting and Learnyounode. It was a lot of fun and really interesting for me.
I started to learn to program when I was very young (6 or so). I continued to code (mostly copying other people’s programs) throughout my childhood and took additional classes in highschool and college. So it was really interesting to me to see people who hadn’t had those experiences learn to code.
The Javascripting workshop was mostly made up of first time programmers. Some were middle-aged adults who were interested in learing about what their spouse or kids did for work. Some were IT or other professionals who were looking to grow other skillsets. And there were a couple of college students that were interested in studying technology or computer science.
All of them made great progress, although not all of them finished the exercises. It was a lot of fun seeing them suddenly “get it” as a new concept clicked and their code ran.
The afternoon Learnyounode workshop was very different but still fun. Many of the attendees had experience as developers and were looking to expand their skillsets in JavaScript and NodeJS. Several of the students from the morning stayed to attempt the afternoon exercises. Overall, the afternoon was much quieter and more serious. Fewer questions were asked but you could see people doing a lot of their own research to understand the concepts being presented.
I hope that we’ll have more of these workshops in the future. People seemed to get a lot out of them.
I’m hoping for the next workshop, we can address some of the perceived difficencies of the exercises. Our biggest complaint was that the exercises didn’t address the “why” of programming. They were completely focused on the “how”. There was also an enormous jump in difficulty between the Javascripting exercises and the Learnyounode exercises. The mentor group talked about building our own module to address these shortcomings.