Lesson Feedback

[cameronmcefee]

Now that we've had a chance to go through our six week session, I figured I'd open this up so we could post some feedback here. Feedback from mentors, parents, and students welcome.

Some possible directions, but feel free to post your own:

• How was the six-week format vs our previous one-off sessions?
• How were the lessons?
• Did we focus too much or not focus enough on anything?
• What could we improve?

[emckean]

The six-week format seemed great to us, lots of carryover from week to week. Really appreciate all the work y'all put into this, it was lots of fun!

It would be great to have a list of mentors so we could thank them individually. :-)

Only suggestion I have -- maybe pair up the kids randomly to have them help each other? Never too early to learn pair programming. :-)

[cameronmcefee]

maybe pair up the kids randomly to have them help each other?

@emckean that's definitely a good idea. It's definitely one of our ideas for improvement, but we haven't pulled it off very well (or at all) so far. We'll definitely work on that in the future.

Everyone from this round of lessons will get notifications from this thread, so your thanks will definitely get to them.

cc @CoderDojoSF/build-your-own-adventure

[donjo]

I liked the six-week format more than the one-off sessions. I think it gave the more advanced students more room to grow and it was cool to see the projects evolve over time.

I still think there is work to be done around getting kids to collaborate with each other and encouraging the more advanced kids to take on projects outside the scope of what we are presenting. Maybe having the kids introduce themselves to each other at the beginning of the multi-week lesson could help with the first thing and the second thing may just take some time.

[tomfaulhaber]

Tommy (and I)really enjoyed the 6-week format. The continuity was nice (in projects, people, and ideas) and the ability to noodle around more within that format was nice too. One thing I thought was great about it was the ability to focus more on art and sound while still having the program be at the center.

As other commenters mentioned, I think the next step would be increasing the student-to-student collaboration. Maybe doing focused exercises in randomly assigned teams. The ClojureDojo, which is for adults, randomly combines folks into 3-person teams for each session. Easier for them since the sessions are standalone and more intense than would make sense for the kids.

Special thanks to all the organizers and mentors. We really appreciate your dedication to this! We can't wait to see you for the next session.