On Saturday, Susan and I taught our one day workshop called Learn To Commit for the second time. The event was organized by Makaela Kingsley from the Petricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship. We had a terrific group of undergraduate women attend who showed up well prepared and were super engaged throughout the day.
Having now taught this twice we will adjust the curriculum based on the lessons learned which include
Building your own personal web site is highly motivating. It is surprising how few students have one.
With namecheap’s offering for a free year of a .me domain (need a .edu account to register) and using github pages, and only open source tools, there is no cost to participants (other than needing their own laptop). Thanks also to Digital Ocean for providing credits.
Exposing students to professional tools including git, github, the command line, a modern code editor, etc. as opposed to toy examples is genuinely empowering. It shows participants that these things aren’t inaccessible mysteries.
We still have too much in one day and if we want to cover Javascript, it should probably be a two day program (we did go through at least one example and everyone enjoyed changing the graphical output).
Starting with simple templates for sites (and also code examples) that can be modified as opposed to starting from scratch works incredibly well. I will write a separate post on how computer education in general should be more read + modify than write from scratch.
We had high school students participate and they did great. Our “Learn To Commit” program could definitely be used among high school juniors and seniors.
The single biggest takeaway for everyone is the importance of just getting going and then using search when you are stuck on a problem.
If you are interested in having Learn To Commit at your school or university, please reach out. We are happy to make the materials available (they are online already).
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