Skills Workshops

All Skills Workshops held at Makers Academy.

What are Skills Workshops?

Whole-cohort activities that take 1 - 1.5 hours. Each trains a specific skill, while addressing certain concepts along the way.

How do I run them?

Instructions for running any Skills Workshop are available as INSTRUCTIONS.md in each workshop directory. Skills Workshops are split into three parts: a Starter, Main, and Plenary.

Before the workshop

• Decide on what the main point of the workshop is. For instance: "Students can do encapsulation well." Keep it vague. Having this in mind will help keep your Starter tight and focussed.

Starter

In the Starter, the coach:

• Introduces the headline of the workshop, tying to previous workshops if possible
• Assesses how confident the cohort feels in each of the three upcoming Learning Objectives for the workshop
• Demonstrates whatever is required to get to the Main.

Starters generally last for 15 - 20 minutes.

Tips for effective Starters

• Facilitate where possible. That is; don't just talk, constantly ask questions of the cohort to help you demo code/processes.
• Feel free to make mistakes and ask students to prompt you to move forward.
• An easy way to check student confidence in a Learning Objective is to ask them to give you 'thumbs': 100% up means 'I can definitely do that', 100% down means 'no idea what that means', and somewhere in the middle is 'maybe'.
• Keep it really tight. Give students enough, but a Starter is not a lecture. It's tempting to to off-piste and help students out with a bunch of ancillary skills they're struggling with. Avoid getting too deep into things that aren't the main point you identified before the workshop.

Main

In the Main, students work on an extended activity. Instructions for students are found in the README.md of each workshop.

In the Main, the coach:

• Sets a time limit for students to regather for the Plenary.
• Checks with students to motivate them to solve problems, but doesn't solve them.
• Ensures effective pairing is happening.

Mains generally last for 30 - 45 minutes.

Tips for effective Mains

• Students forget when they started a task. So it's better to say 'regather at 11' than to say 'you have half an hour'
• If students are regularly running over time, set a big, noticeable timer on-screen. Google has one.
• Few students complete the Main activity. This is intended and good: students should always feel under 'time pressure' during a Main.
• Some Mains in this repo are differentiated by task. This is a structure to ensure that all learners make good progress towards the main point, regardless of where they are at the beginning of the Main.
• For repos that aren't differentiated by task, differentiate by support.

Plenary

In the Plenary, students demonstrate their solutions to the Main activity. The coach:

• Facilitates discussion and points out key areas for improvement. Ideally, these key areas are linked to the week's outcomes.
• Returns to the Learning Objectives and re-assesses cohort confidence.
• OPTIONAL Gathers feedback on the workshop.

Plenaries generally last for 15 - 25 minutes.

Tips for effective Plenaries

• Reiterate things. It's generally better to pick out one key problem three times than three problems once.
• Use a randomiser to randomly choose who demos their code: otherwise, only the most confident people in the cohort will volunteer. Using a randomiser ensures the heat is off you as a coach.
• Point out to students that their confidence in these topics has risen, and that this is the key point of the workshop.
• One effective way to encourage learner reflection is to give students post-it notes on the way out of the workshop, and to write 1 - 3 things they picked up from this workshop on it. They can stick it on the door on the way out and you can get a sense of how the workshop went.

Adding more Workshops

When adding workshops, please follow the existing structures so everything stays lovely and consistent:

• Workshops have a Starter, Main, and Plenary
• Instructions for delivering the Workshop are in an INSTRUCTIONS.md
• Student guidance for the Main activity are in a README.md
• The plenary branch exclusively contains material relevant to running the Plenary (i.e. usually a model completed Main)
• Workshops are named skill_<number> where <number> indicates the order the workshop should be given in the sequence of similar workshops