Want to run an event?

[mikeal]

Can we use this thread to collect "what you need to know to run a NodeSchool" so that we can link to this on the main website and encourage more people to run local events.

Listening to this podcast is probably a good idea :)

http://www.nodeup.com/fiftyfive

Also read these summary posts from previous events:

http://blog.hood.ie/2013/11/nodeschool-london/ https://github.com/nodeschool/nodeschool.github.io/issues/15

[ghost]

There is now a link at the bottom of http://nodeschool.io pointing to this issue thread. Additionally, if you have a venue booked to run a nodeschool event, state the date and location in this thread to get your event listed on the website and also link to a tweet so you can be retweeted by the nodeschool twitter account.

[rvagg]

Also, we need stickers that can be given out at any of the events, @maxogden & @jlord you guys seem to be king & queen of nerd stickers, can you make this happen?

Perhaps anyone running an event can request to have a batch sent to them, or get the design to be printed locally or whatever. I imagine something about completing NodeSchool: "I attended NodeSchool and survived" or whatever.

[mattcreager]

Hey folks, I'm in Halifax, NS and have been pulling together a local JS meetup, I'm considering about making this a regular part of the meetup, perhaps an hour of node school followed by an hour of lightning talks, has anyone got experience with this mix?

[mikeal]

@mattcreager that sounds like what BrooklynJS is planning to soon (layering in NodeSchool before the talks of their regular event). /cc @brianloveswords

[mattcreager]

Thanks @mikeal! @brianloveswords will you let me know how it goes?

[donnfelker]

FYI - I'm thinking about doing one in Phoenix soon.

[JaimeLynSchatz]

Anyone up for an event in the Redmond/Seattle/Eastside area?

[JaimeLynSchatz]

I know something folks who want to run an event need to do: 1. Read the thread topic ( ;) mea culpa) and 2. Know where to post things like my misplaced comment above.

[elf-pavlik]

http://www.opentechschool.org/ @xMartin @utstikkar @sjockers @ligthyear how about peering? :palm_tree:

[richorama]

I plan to help run one in Norwich, UK on 10th March.

http://www.meetup.com/Norfolk-Developers-NorDev/events/158375062/

If there are some stickers or resources available, that would be great.

[iancrowther]

Im up for doing another event in London at Shoreditch Village Hall.
@maxogden any chance you can get in touch on twitter(@iancrowther) with some of the costs/gotchas/who to call?

[sclarson]

FYI, we're going to be doing these as a workshop series for the dev meetup in Sioux Falls, SD. We have a mix of designers and developers that are registered.

[max-mapper]

@iancrowther I believe @andrew expressed interest recently in helping run a https://github.com/jlord/git-it workshop (a workshopper by @jlord) in london

I tried to write up the gotchas here: https://github.com/nodeschool/nodeschool.github.io/issues/15

[hackygolucky]

Thanks @maxogden!! We've got our first workshop set for the end of February in PDX and you guys documenting all of the adventures will certainly help us avoid the pitfalls.

[iancrowther]

@maxogden So Im doing an event in London on March 12th at Shoreditch Work Village Hall

Can you add me to the ti.to so i can get some tickets in the wild.

example: https://ti.to/nodeschool/london-march-2014

[brianloveswords]

Just got confirmation from the space today: I'm gonna be running an event in Brooklyn on Sunday, Feb 23rd at Huge – https://ti.to/nodeschool-nyc/brooklyn-february-2014

[mikeal]

w00t w00t!

[brianloveswords]

@hackygolucky you should add your event to nodeschool.io! https://github.com/nodeschool/nodeschool.github.io/edit/master/index.html

[mikeal]

And both of you should add it to node-meatspace :)

https://github.com/knode/node-meatspace

SLACKERS!

[hackygolucky]

:D Indeed! I also need to get our ti.to page up because we've got a nodeschool workshop running Feb. 21 in PDX!!!

Thanks @mikeal

On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 11:16 AM, Mikeal Rogers notifications@github.comwrote:

And both of you should add it to node-meatspace :)

https://github.com/knode/node-meatspace

SLACKERS!

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/nodeschool/discussions/issues/93#issuecomment-33832884 .

[brianloveswords]

haha @mikeal DONE.

[sclarson]

We had 3 people go through learnyounode in advance to be familiar with the problems and having 26 attendees seemed to keep us busy with initial setup issues for 15-20 minutes. After that people seemed to pair up with those next to them for help and we had very few questions. Everything went very well. From some brief polling the average attendee made it through 2/3rds of learnyounode in 2 hours. Everyone we talked to wanted to do it again in the future to finish learnyounode and move on to some of the other lessons.

[max-mapper]

@sclarson w00t!

[hackygolucky]

Feb. 20, https://ti.to/pdxnode/nodeschool Woohoo! Adding to nodeschool.io and node-meatspace now... \o/

[brianloveswords]

:highfive:

[headwinds]

Toronto Javascript Hackers present Node School Tuesday, May 13th / 2014 6:30PM - 9PM

We have a few cool mentors who are all stoked to offer support:

@pnitsch - http://labs.teehanlax.com/ @MikkoH -  http://www.jam3.com/ @adamrhunter - http://splitelement.com/ @pchen - http://karma-laboratory.com

Full Event Info

[adamrhunter]

You have the order mixed up. I don't work for Jam3. I work for SplitElement ;) a.

On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 9:05 AM, brandon flowers notifications@github.comwrote:

Toronto Javascript Hackers present Node School Tuesday, May 13th / 2014 6:30PM - 9PM

We have few a cool mentors who are all stoked to offer support:

@pnitsch https://github.com/pnitsch - http://labs.teehanlax.com/ @MikkoH https://github.com/MikkoH - http://splitelement.com/ @adamrhunter https://github.com/adamrhunter - http://www.jam3.com/

Full Event Info http://www.meetup.com/torontojshackers/events/164164592/

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/nodeschool/discussions/issues/93#issuecomment-34061686 .

Adam Hunter email: arhunter@gmail.com web: http://www.splitelement.com LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/adamrussellhunter Skype: org.pushreset.adam

[headwinds]

Yes you do... and do some awesome things there.. like building apps for Orangutans - if you can teach them, we should be easy

[iancrowther]

London nodeschool March 12th 19:00 - 21:00 Shoreditch Works Village Hall.

https://ti.to/nodeschool/london-march-2014

http://lanyrd.com/2014/ldnnodeschool/

[oriolgual]

At Barcelona FutureJS we have a call for workshops opened until February 28th, and we'd love someone proposing a Node school event.

[julianduque]

NodeSchool Medellin Date: Feb 22, 2014 Hour: 10am Address: Calle 8 # 42 - 49 Medellin, Colombia

Hosted by MedellinJS!

[mikeal]

Everyone who has meetups, please send a PR to the nodeschool website and node-meatspace to help promote your event :)

[julianduque]

done :)

[Sequoia]

Linked here from nodeschool.io "run a nodeschool event." I'm seeking more information on formats that have worked etc..

Looks like what's needed is

1. A space
2. ~1:10 (or greater) "instructors" to learners
3. ~2 hours

People who have put on this event: is this about right?

I'd like to propose an action item for this ticket: "create wikipage on github or page on nodeschool.io with a brief set of instructions/suggestions for holding a nodeschool event." (This thread has useful info but not organized.) I'm happy to do this once I've run an event- is there someone who's done this who's willing to write up a bullet list of stuff to have and/or planning tips? :+1: nodeschool

[jewkesy]

Anybody planning to run an event in central England? Really keen to attend

[brianloveswords]

Debrief from Brooklyn NodeSchool

Stats

I neglected to get exact counts, but we had 7 mentors and about 35 students (1:5 ratio). We were scheduled to run from 2:00pm–5:30pm, but we ended up starting a little late (there was some confusion about the start time) and running a little late, so it was actually closer to 2:30pm–6:30pm. Huge graciously supplied bottles of water and fruit during the event, and at around 5:00pm they brought out beers.

What went well

• In the beginning of the event, I had learners introduce themselves to their tablemates and encouraged them to ask each other for help as much as possible, and I saw a lot of this happening.
• Our physical setup worked really well. As you can see from the pictures above, we had small tables of 5–6 people (and a few couches off to the side which are not pictured). Mentors were easily able to snake around the tables and get in there to help people, and the table setup encouraged people to help their neighbors.
• Learning from some advice by @maxogden, I told mentors wander around the room and periodically ask the tables how people were doing, and if anyone needed any help. This helped people feel more comfortable to We also had enough mentors that some were able to camp out at specific tables to be available for questions.
• About 80% of our learners were working on learnyounode, with a handful working on stream-adventure. This also helped, as the learners working on stream-adventure were encouraged to act as ad-hoc mentors when the other learners at their table got stuck.
• I don't know how best to capture this, but the atmosphere was relaxed and low pressure. I think we did a good job of framing the event as space for hanging out and co-learning rather than anything super formal & top-down.
• Huge, our sponsor for location and victuals, was impressed enough with the event that they have asked me to do more, possibly a monthly series.
• Many of the students came up as they were leaving to thank me and the other mentors, saying how much they learned and how they are looking forward to the next one.
• One of the learners brought his daughter and I got an awesome email from him afterwards saying how much they both enjoyed the event and how she decided she wants to be a programmer now!
• We had a diverse group of both mentors and learners.

What could be improved

• The front door to the building is locked on the weekend (it's a shared office building), which we didn't know. We propped it open, but it closed a few times and I had to go and re-open it. We also didn't have a sign on that exterior door saying something like “nodeschool is here, come to the 2nd floor or tweet at me if the door is locked and you need to get in!“ which might have helped.
• Confusion about the start time – I sent out an email with the wrong time listed in the subject, and though I quickly sent out a correction email, not everyone read the second email, so we had a second wave show up about 30 minutes after the first wave. Thankfully, Huge let us run about an hour later than originally scheduled, so we didn't lose time overall.
• We didn't have a projector, I think it would have been useful especially in the beginning.
• I made the event free and Sunday turned out to be the nicest day of the year. Out of the 60 learners registered, ~25 did not show up (and 3 of our mentors bailed last minute, too). I'm ambivalent about this: we did end up with a great mentor–to–learner ratio anyway, and the number of people was just about perfect for the amount of space we had in the main area, but it was also bummer some people who wanted to come couldn't because we were sold out of tickets. I'm thinking about charging a token amount next time to increase commitment (and donating the proceeds).
• Almost everyone got stuck on the Make It Modular section of learnyounode. I want to think about how to write a new example in the hints section, or maybe even an intermediary lesson.
• That off-by-one error on the counting lines exercise frustrated a lot of people.
• We should prepare a form, maybe a google survey, asking students “what did you like, what didn't you like, what could be improved,” etc!
• I wish we had stickers!!

Conclusion

Everyone had an awesome time, and I'm looking forward to the next one! Thanks to my mentor team, @toolness, @sarajo, @johnkpaul, @jcrugzz, @reconbot, @furf and @ameensol! If you have anything you want to add, please feel free!

[hackygolucky]

This is awesome, @brianloveswords !!! Looking forward to getting PDXNode's report out from last week as well.

On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 11:07 AM, Brian J Brennan notifications@github.comwrote:

Debrief from Brooklyn NodeSchool

[image: image]https://github-camo.global.ssl.fastly.net/d983a546d901a6187fa462f7d8aea1c8dbc1cff8/687474703a2f2f64697374696c6c657279696d616765342e616b2e696e7374616772616d2e636f6d2f64306335356261653963643831316533386463343065326437646236626263305f382e6a7067 [image: image]https://github-camo.global.ssl.fastly.net/d875a54fffb2542159f6df0e0cf3a5e01cdc9717/687474703a2f2f64697374696c6c657279696d616765342e616b2e696e7374616772616d2e636f6d2f34373063613965303963633331316533393935363065666362366665393339385f382e6a7067 Stats

I neglected to get exact counts, but we had 7 mentors and about 35 students (1:5 ratio). We were scheduled to run from 2:00pm-5:30pm, but we ended up starting a little late (there was some confusion about the start time) and running a little late, so it was actually closer to 2:30pm-6:30pm. Huge graciously supplied bottles of water and fruit during the event, and at around 5:00pm they brought out beers. What went well

-

In the beginning of the event, I had learners introduce themselves to their tablemates and encouraged them to ask each other for help as much as possible, and I saw a lot of this happening.

Our physical setup worked really well. As you can see from the pictures above, we had small tables of 5-6 people (and a few couches off to the side which are not pictured). Mentors were easily able to snake around the tables and get in there to help people, and the table setup encouraged people to help their neighbors.

Learning from some advice by @maxogden https://github.com/maxogden, I told mentors wander around the room and periodically ask the tables how people were doing, and if anyone needed any help. This helped people feel more comfortable to We also had enough mentors that some were able to camp out at specific tables to be available for questions.

About 80% of our learners were working on learnyounode, with a handful working on stream-adventure. This also helped, as the learners working on stream-adventure were encouraged to act as ad-hoc mentors when the other learners at their table got stuck.

I don't know how best to capture this, but the atmosphere was relaxed and low pressure. I think we did a good job of framing the event as space for hanging out and co-learning rather than anything super formal & top-down.

Huge, our sponsor for location and victuals, was impressed enough with the event that they have asked me to do more, possibly a monthly series.

Many of the students came up as they were leaving to thank me and the other mentors, saying how much they learned and how they are looking forward to the next one.

One of the learners brought his daughter and I got an awesome email from him afterwards saying how much they both enjoyed the event and how she decided she wants to be a programmer now!

We had a diverse group of both mentors and learners.

What could be improved

-

The front door to the building is locked on the weekend (it's a shared office building), which we didn't know. We propped it open, but it closed a few times and I had to go and re-open it. We also didn't have a sign on that exterior door saying something like "nodeschool is here, come to the 2nd floor or tweet at me if the door is locked and you need to get in!" which might have helped.

Confusion about the start time - I sent out an email with the wrong time listed in the subject, and though I quickly sent out a correction email, not everyone read the second email, so we had a second wave show up about 30 minutes after the first wave. Thankfully, Huge let us run about an hour later than originally scheduled, so we didn't lose time overall.

We didn't have a projector, I think it would have been useful especially in the beginning.

I made the event free and Sunday turned out to be the nicest day of the year. Out of the 60 learners registered, ~25 did not show up (and 3 of our mentors bailed last minute, too). I'm ambivalent about this: we did end up with a great mentor-to-learner ratio anyway, and the number of people was just about perfect for the amount of space we had in the main area, but it was also bummer some people who wanted to come couldn't because we were sold out of tickets. I'm thinking about charging a token amount next time to increase commitment (and donating the proceeds).

Almost everyone got stuck on the Make It Modular section of learnyounode. I want to think about how to write a new example in the hints section, or maybe even an intermediary lesson.

That off-by-one error on the counting lines exercise frustrated a lot of people.

We should prepare a form, maybe a google survey, asking students "what did you like, what didn't you like, what could be improved," etc!

I wish we had stickers!!

Conclusion

Everyone had an awesome time, and I'm looking forward to the next one! Thanks to my mentor team, @toolness https://github.com/toolness, @sarajohttps://github.com/sarajo, @johnkpaul https://github.com/johnkpaul, @jcrugzzhttps://github.com/jcrugzz, @reconbot https://github.com/reconbot, @furf https://github.com/furfand @ameensol https://github.com/ameensol! If you have anything you want to add, please feel free!

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/nodeschool/discussions/issues/93#issuecomment-36045066 .

[mikeal]

@brianloveswords thanks for this amazing write up!

In the beginning of the event, I had learners introduce themselves to their tablemates and encouraged them to ask each other for help as much as possible, and I saw a lot of this happening.

This is a really great practice. We might want to start collecting this stuff in a markdown file somewhere.

Almost everyone got stuck on the Make It Modular section of learnyounode. I want to think about how to write a new example in the hints section, or maybe even an intermediary lesson.

I've noticed this one also has a disproportionate amount of support requests as well. Maybe we should look in to refactoring this. @rvagg what do you think?

Out of the 60 learners registered, ~25 did not show up (and 3 of our mentors bailed last minute, too)

I would love to talk to tito about an "RSVP commitment" feature where we collect credit card information and only charge people if they don't attend.

[julianduque]

First NodeSchool @ Medellin

The event was a success!, on our Meetup page we had 30 people registered but only 21 shown up the day of the event. We worked only on learnyounode, next event will be focusing streams-adventure. Only 1 mentor was involved in the event (me :p) but it was an awesome experience :)

Also I'm writing a new workshop, will share more info when gets ready :)

[SaraJo]

Yay Medellin! On Tuesday, February 25, 2014, Julian Duque notifications@github.com wrote:

First NodeSchool @ Medellin

The event was a success!, on our Meetup pagehttp://www.meetup.com/MedellinJS/events/167090612/we had 30 people registered but only 21 shown up the day of the event. We worked only on learnyounode, next event will be focusing streams-adventure. Only 1 mentor was involved in the event (me :p) but it was an awesome experience :)

Also I'm writing a new workshop, will share more info when gets ready :)

[image: highres_336145142]https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/733877/2266727/d84652aa-9ea1-11e3-87a4-13ccddf445e9.jpeg

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/nodeschool/discussions/issues/93#issuecomment-36090956 .

Sara J Chipps 862.201.3065 CTO Flatiron School http://flatironschool.com

Blog http://SaraJChipps.com http://sarajchipps.com/

Projects http://GirlDevelopIt.com http://girldevelopit.com/ http://Levo.com http://levoleague.com/ http://ElizabethandClarke.com http://elizabethandclarke.com/

---

No trees were killed in sending this message but a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.

[buritica]

Will be running the first one in Bogota in April when i'm down there for a few days. Looking for a venue right now, tentative dates are 11 or 12 of April. @brianloveswords how long was the event?

[brianloveswords]

@Buritica official run time was 2pm–5:30pm, but some people showed up at 2:30pm and some people stuck around until ~6:30pm, so about 2.5–3 hours.

[hackygolucky]

Portland’s first nodeschool.io workshop

A great turnout, a few hiccups, lessons learned. ON PLANNING The charge was led by PDXNode. We were fortunate enough to have 10 mentors, many our own PDXNode organizers and others who were fantastic community members willing to step up for mentor roles. We built a plan of attack by doing a little homework.

A huge thanks to everyone who contributed to conversations in in this very room for insight on how we could avoid some of the pitfalls of prior workshops and were able to offer an awesome experience to our students. After reading this and recognizing what would suit our strengths, we decided on group sizes of 18 to maximize mentor-to-student ratio. The mentors were asked to familiarize themselves with the workshops being offered in order to be the most help on-site.

We chose to kick-off nodeschool in Portland by offering three workshops concurrently: Learn You The Node.js For Much Win!, async You, and Functional JavaScript. We ran out of space for Learn You Node in a few days’ time. Functional JavaScript(18) and async You had a smaller following at 12. We were super fortunate to have only 3 no-shows from our rsvp list. I wonder now if that was out of how small we kept the ticket offering in the first place.

The attendee breakdown seemed to filter very well for the workshops. All three workshops seemed to attract new-to-node and new programmers alike. We had a 1:6 gender ratio for turnout. I’d like this to be better, but we have to be more cognizant and deliberate in our outreach in order to make that happen.

Quickleft was amazing and immediately responsive in supplying our students with food and drinks to keep them energized through the evening. Urban Airship was kind enough to provide us with a common space and breakout rooms to allow for flexibility in the learning environment. Our sponsors helped provide a really solid first offering.

ON LEARNING We kicked off the event at 6pm.

Welcome! Get comfy, grab some pizza, and take a seat. If you don’t already have it, hop on our wifi and get the registered workshop installed on your laptop while we get situated and make friends. If you don’t know how to make that happen, find one of our smiling mentors and we’ll get you set up. This soft install start allowed us to mitigate wifi trouble for a little while.

We’re all here to learn. We have a code of conduct. It’s mostly, ‘Don’t be a jerk.” My name is Tracy. Find me if you need to talk about anything. The other mentors are happy to help, too.

The mentors lined up, introduced themselves, and then we did the wave. Yup, the wave. It was mostly to shake things out and let the students know we’re a bunch of dorks and there’s absolutely no reason to fear asking questions from us. Keep it silly.

We’re going to be peer learning. When we break off into smaller groups, make sure and say hi to the few people sitting around you. They are probably new to this. They are happy to try and help. Be loud. Ask questions. Raise your hand. Most important, be kind. Even our mentors had hiccups trying these workshops. It isn’t easy!

We moved out to our breakouts and the students jumped right in.

From Wraithan, one our mentors:

Last week I got to participate in the first PDX Nodeschool event. I joined as a mentor and helped out in the Functional Javascript room. It was a lot of fun to teach students the value of using recursion and callbacks over traditional imperative programming. We had students that started as low as not even having node installed but all got at least 4-5 questions through it in about 1.5-2 hours. The session came to a natural close about 15 minutes before we were supposed to clear out. It was a great experience and I can't wait to mentor at another.

MISTAKES WERE MADE The eternal struggle of wifi haunts us at our events. We’ll have to continue to prioritize finding ways to not need wifi as much as possible during events. We were forced to ask students to drop off the network so that others could access it when needed. For future events, we plan on adding a call for thumbdrives donated by a sponsor. We’d love to be able to offer small storage take home drives that just contain the evening’s workshops on them. I had the MDN archived from a wifi-less flight I had taken recently.

While the air was chill and students were helpful, it was still a pretty quiet evening. The students were pretty helpful to one another. The intermediate attendees naturally paired up with a neighbor and helped out, calling mentors over for more clarification rather than help with the problems themselves. I’ve considered a more interactive approach for the next workshop--the intention being to encourage everyone, especially newcomers, to speak code and work through a problem together. After there's time for everyone to work on an exercise, a few students at a time get up and walk through their solution--or the lackthereof.

We also didn’t do proper introductions to the format of the command line interface after the break-off into each individual workshop. The Functional JavaScript mentors outlined the first few steps on the whiteboard. We should have been consistent. Our assumption that everyone was already comfortable with it made this less accessible than intended.

We were a bit haphazard with sponsorships. We went back and forth on whether we should charge for registration to keep rsvps compliant. We planned this event pretty quickly, which didn’t allow for us to prepare our in-progress prospectus for financial help. Fortunately for us, amazing sponsors like QuickLeft stepped up immediately to make the event more comfortable.

ENOUGH OF THAT. IT WAS AWESOME. We had a ton of excitement generated from nodeschool. Our students can’t wait for the next workshop night and were already reporting back on finishing what they’d started. Many jumped into other workshops on their own the weekend after. We had an even more successful Code & Learn/Nodebots night this week thanks to enthusiasm and confidence built from nodeschool.

One of our mentors, Dave Justice, wrote a tutorial after “students were digging around for Async docs and were continually being booted off of the WiFi.” We ended up getting a quick resource on how to help handle offline development for future events!

This wouldn’t have been possible without our sponsors. We’re lucky to have companies that see value in community. Everyone had an awesome time, and I'm looking forward to the next one! Thanks to the mentors who made this rock: @nvcexploder, @nrn, @justinabrahms, @jarofghosts, @wraithan, @chrisdickinson, @jondlm, @meandavejustice, and @dlmanning!

STAY TUNED! Next NODESCHOOL APRIL 24th

[elf-pavlik]

@brianloveswords what do you think about issuing Open Badges for people who participated in workshops? :trophy:

[max-mapper]

@elf-pavlik it's been planned for a while but nobodys implemented it yet. see https://gist.github.com/toolness/6527882 for some technical details

[max-mapper]

I just put together a new page on the nodeschool site:

http://nodeschool.io/host

It has a compilation of stuff from this thread and other places. Feel free to send PRs adding/removing content from there. it also lists all the awesome writeups that are in here.

@hackygolucky @brianloveswords @julianduque thank you so much for the writeups!

[hackygolucky]

Nice! Thanks @maxogden for whittling it down to a digestible minimum for everyone seeking guidance. Y'all make running this a whole lot easier. On Mar 2, 2014 1:47 PM, "Max Ogden" notifications@github.com wrote:

I just put together a new page on the nodeschool site:

http://nodeschool.io/host

It has a compilation of stuff from this thread and other places. Feel free to send PRs adding/removing content from there. it also lists all the awesome writeups that are in here.

@hackygolucky https://github.com/hackygolucky @brianloveswordshttps://github.com/brianloveswords @julianduque https://github.com/julianduque thank you so much for the writeups!

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/nodeschool/discussions/issues/93#issuecomment-36468335 .

[elf-pavlik]

@maxogden nice! I thought more in direction of issuing badges in semi-automated way by people who organize workshops and based on feedback from mentors... if people RSVP using Mozilla Persona it all could boil down to just few clicks to confirm issuing badges in the end of an event. Soon I may need to put together anyhow some self-hosted workshop organizing app with support for issuing Open Badges, maybe also playing there using RSVP explained in Integration of Hydra into Schema.org, if someone would like to team up on doing that I could try to give it higher priority! Maybe @xMartin & Open Tech School crew?

[olizilla]

Sinfo nodeschool

http://xxi.sinfo.org/index.php/home/schedule/workshops/nodejs-workshop

• 30 RSVP'd and 35 turned up!
• 4 mentors (@olizilla @alanshaw @cwaring & last minute super bonus help from @diasdavid)
• 1.5 hours long (5:30pm - 7pm)
• Pair programming
• Total epic win!
• 97% did learnyounode
• 3% did levelmeup
• Highest score: http collect
• Everyone got at least as far as filtered LS

As people arrived we introduced ourselves and got them all to install node and learnyounode. We'd asked everyone to install node before arriving but about 20% hadn't. Took about 15mins to get everyone in and ready to roll.

We forked the nodeschool site and served it from a laptop, complete with direct downloads to zips of the workshoppers, just in case of grand internet fail. Wireless isolation was sidestepped via the wonders of http://localtunnel.me/

We did a bit of an experiment and asked them all to pair program. We had a terminal on the projector and demonstrated how to install learnyounode, run it and then worked through the HELLO WORLD challenge, keeping the tone suitably silly and friendly (there may have been some dancing to the Rocky theme tune). We deliberately got it wrong the first time so we could show how to use the verify and run commands to help debug, and demonstrating how to pair program at the same time.

We didn't strictly enforce pairing, but it seemed to work really well as ruse to get people helping each other. The room was never silent, and as people were talking already, they seemed comfortable asking questions when they got stuck. For the most part, having 2 brains on a workshopper meant there were fewer people getting stuck. There were still a couple of lone wolves, who didn't want to pair, so we made sure to check in on them regularly as we buzzed around the room.

The issues we faced were really down to people not reading the workshoppers, the most common stumbling blocks were:

• Passing arguments to solutions. About 50% thought they had to find a file and pass it as to their solution when running it. It'd be a good idea to explain how workshopper works at the beginning
• Off by one on the newline counting. Event though the solution explains it...
• The mismatch between path.extname returning the file extension with a ".", and the extension passed to Filtered LS not.

Far from problems, I think they are representative of issues a developer will face, so I don't think we need to make any changes to the workshoppers, it's just worth giving mentors the heads up on the common pitfalls.

We had a bunch of ubuntu install issues, but easily remedied by following the steps in: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Installing-Node.js-via-package-manager#wiki-ubuntu-mint-elementary-os

Everyone left happy and looking forward to trying more workshoppers. Thanks for all the write ups, they really help, and, GO NODESCHOOL!

[cwaring]

SINFO appendix \o/

I've uploaded some pictorial evidence from our SINFO Nodeschool. The pair programming worked out brilliantly.