Summary: in Cape Town we have switched to running one day events, and are going to have mentors pull people through the InstallFest in a much more hands-on way.
We (the RBCPT org team) would like some feedback on this. :)
The traditional shape is Friday night InstallFest, Saturday day workshop. A lot of our target audience live in areas with high crime rates and come to our workshops via public transport. This combination means asking them to go home late on a Friday night, with a laptop, is simply not safe. After a lot of discussion, we switched to doing just a Saturday, which meant doing the InstallFest in the morning.
The InstallFest can take a while, especially if you hit some roadblocks. We’ve received feedback that people that people don’t like the installing software bit of the InstallFest: they find it intimidating, not fun, and very slow-going. We’ve received this feedback verbally, via feedback sessions at our events, and via our google form survey, from several workshops.
Negative experiences have a bigger impact and last longer in memory than positive experiences, so we want to shorten them or get rid of them. We want to focus on giving our attendees an introduction to coding, not to the first time set up of a project (which can often be a negative experience, even for developers with lots of experience).
We’ve had attendees at our events who ended the day feeling like they hadn’t done much coding because they spent so much time doing the InstallFest. We confirmed this at yesterday’s workshop. We’ve decided that we need to change things up, based on what we believe and the feedback we’ve received.
Cloud-Based IDEs won’t work for us because many of our attendees don’t have high speed or reliable internet access at home. We don’t want to do some kind of VM-based solution because it adds another layer of abstraction to the process and another spot where things could go wrong and be confusing. We thought about taking a different approach by making the InstallFest shorter, but that didn’t quite work out. We tried something at our workshop yesterday that worked well, and we’re going to try it again at our next workshop.
We’re going to do a thing where an attendee and a mentor pair up to blitz through the installation software part of the InstallFest very quickly. This will take the form of a mentor quickly doing the installing bits for the attendee. They’ll talk through the steps and explain what they’re doing (“I’m installing Ruby, which is the programming language you’ll be using.”), why they’re doing it (“Set up can be a pain, but you don’t do it often. We want to get you coding, not setting up stuff, so I’m doing this bit for you.”). Once stuff is installed, the student takes over and creates their first Rails app.