Style of presentation

[OracPrime]

I think we need to recognise that we have two things: a curriculum and a presentation of a curriculum. I want to raise some questions about the latter, and whether we need more than one way of presenting the underlying material. In particular as an experienced professional I expect to be presented with a high-density set of information, probably largely textual, and to be able to rapidly read and scroll through it. If I were presented with this:

I would roll my eyes and go elsewhere.

For quite a lot of CYF material there is a hierarchy of information presented as simple and/or decorated pages where the is no random access to a particular page (you have to follow the hierarchy) and you can't see the whole lot in one go. I can see how this may make sense in a classroom environment, but for information transfer it is horribly inefficient. We are training people to work in a profession which spends all day staring at dense pages of text. We shouldn't be scared of wordier pages.

I would hope that we could have a single source of content published in two (or more) ways, rather than duplicating the source

[illicitonion]

This is a very reasonable request!

I've generally been building up an Overview page, which exists for each course, for this kind of skimmability - see https://programming.codeyourfuture.io/overview/ for the ITP one - its implementation is https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/curriculum/blob/main/common-theme/layouts/_default/overview.html and it's implemented by re-navigating the same underlying content, rather than duplicating it. Currently it shows each module, sprint, and each of the prep topics, with links to per-sprint Objectives and Prep overviews.

Suggestions/contributions for both how to improve this view, and what other views may be valuable, are super welcome!

[OracPrime]

https://programming.codeyourfuture.io/overview/ Do we have any research references that suggest the density of emojis helps comprehension? Why do we have so many?

[illicitonion]

That's definitely a @SallyMcGrath question :)

[OracPrime]

Bear in mind I may just be the product of educational techniques of the 60s to 80s and things may have moved on (but I doubt it)

[SallyMcGrath]

Hi David. Here is some background that might be useful to you.

1. The curriculum is a presentation of the underlying material, typically a repo eg https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/Module-User-Focused-Data produces https://programming.codeyourfuture.io/user-data/sprints/1/backlog/

The platform runs over the repo and produces a friendly view for trainees, organised into a schedule of learning. But they could engage with it directly on the repo, as they will when they complete projects and plan their learning. There's always a 🔗 link back to the source of truth when it's a remote source like this.

That view is just the github issues, in this case, but It could be a README or a sequenced list of readmes, or a number of other things. Here's another example:

https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/CYF-Workshops => https://workshops.codeyourfuture.io/

The path (course / learning journey) is the valuable part, not an info dump. Our trainees are drowning in information. They don't need more information, they need guidance through the vast unfathomable sea of information. If you want an info dump there are many thousands of them available, on every technical topic you can imagine. Nobody needs us to write another.

2. Teaching is not about information transfer. It's not an activity of transferring a block of information into a person. There's a provocation 😉

I'll provide some more materials about this over the next few months, but you might find these links helpful for now:

https://programming.codeyourfuture.io/how-this-works/ https://teachtogether.tech/en/index.html 👈 very useful manual for CS pedagogy https://common.codeyourfuture.io/common-theme/block-types/ https://common.codeyourfuture.io/more-sources/repos/ https://docs.google.com/document/d/18LF9yn-3Hge-96ITRAQJuPZiJ71tAOSDyO3MRyBJdIc/edit?usp=sharing

[OracPrime]

On the subject of different learning styles, I lobbed the curriculum front page at notebooklm.google.com and asked it to make a podcast about it. I've only listened to the first 5 minutes, but it's quite impressive

https://1drv.ms/u/c/553b78ea2d961ce4/EZW5bCm-wk9PsIDlYxgten4Bl4FVp9vFHD4jLyYQ6Ebgaw?e=jJwfJ8

[SallyMcGrath]

Yeah we've all been playing with this too 😂 Freaky, isn't it?

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/ee0ce0ef-c53f-4bf6-9c64-873858b44663