The complete schedule for the event and the address can be found at: http://railsgirls.com/la
This account of Coaching a Study Group is a great guide for everyone to read.
The Guide (tutorial)
This is the tutorial we will go through with the students. It is not a race to get through it all. Aim for getting up to the part where it says to take a break. Anything past that point is frosting.
https://gist.github.com/jendiamond/5a26b531e8e47b4aa638
Guide to the Guide http://guides.railsgirls.com/guide-to-the-guide/
Much of this guide is taken directly from: http://guides.railsgirls.com/coach/
This may be your first time or your hundredth time coaching but this is what we would like out of our coaches. :)
- Patience, willingness to help, and a friendly attitude :)
- Being able to answer all sorts of questions in a beginner friendly way (even if the explanation isn’t technically completely exact) throughout the duration of the workshop.
- Experience with web programming (you know what MVC means, right?), not necessarily in Rails.
- Some time to go through the basic app tutorial before the event.
- Don’t be afraid to ask for help from other coaches or Google things. It's good for the students to know that learning is a process.
- Encourage students not to copy and paste unless it's a really big blob of code like the css.
Often coaches who are just one step ahead of attendees are the best at explaining :) Use real life metaphors and explain very high-level. Explaining too deep will cause a flood of information that is not necessary at the beginning.
Friday, 7pm - 10pm
Rails Girls workshops begin with an Installation party during which you’ll be asked to help students install the required software and make sure before they leave that they are really to start programming the next day.
You need to make sure that they have
- Everything necessary to run Rails installed (run
rails newto be sure) - a text editor
- a GitHub account
- a Heroku account
- Also make sure they can open their terminal. Show them a few commands in it to make sure they know how to use it.
You don’t have to be an expert on all operating systems, but you can help on those you are familiar with. Our installation process via Virtual Box, Vagrant and Ansible should help alleviate most of the pain points we have had in the past. You may have to learn a few thinks about working in vagrant so be ready. Mainly, all the rails commands are done in the vagrant instance and you can edit your file outside of it in sublime. You also commit and push outside of the vagrant instance. I will email a guide.
Saturday, 9am - 6pm
During Saturday, you will be the star of the show and help your group of two build their first web app in Rails with the help of the tutorial. First there will be a few talks given by the organizers, sponsors and past Rails Girls happens just after the initial batch of lectures sometime after 11 AM (Make sure to enjoy some breakfast).
Going through the tutorial on your own at home will usually be all the preparation you need. You could have the open on your computer so they can have more space on their screens. Guide them through the process, providing explanations of what’s going on at each step. The explanations shouldn’t be highly technical; try to simplify the answer by providing easy to remember metaphors. And remember that there is no such thing as a stupid question at a Rails Girls workshop! Let your students know they can ask you about anything along the way; you can spend more time on parts they find more interesting.
Also, don’t be discouraged if you’ll sometimes need to try a few different explanations. Most students will be beginners, so they won’t have many existing points of reference (bonus point: nor will they have any bad habits some programmers tend to pick up along the way).
If you need help with anything, don’t be afraid to use Google or ask another coach to help you out. And don’t be afraid to ask for a break if you need it, it’s going to be a long day, but we can promise you’ll get home with a big smile and a warm heart :)
Some other great first-hand tips from Rails Girls coaches:
- My Experience Coaching at Rails Girls LA 2015 By: Ursula Messick
- 4 lessons learned from teaching at Rails Girls Berlin
- I infiltrated #railsgirlslj, here’s what it was like
- What I learned learning Rails / becoming a better teacher -Tips for coaching a programming study group
It doesn't matter if your students finish. Remind them of that.
Remember that the students will be learning a ridiculous amount in a day. This is exhausting. They are parsing every word. Learning something new is often accompanied by feelings of nervousness, lack of self belief and high stress levels. When your students apologize or say ‘duh’ or say something negative about themselves for not knowing something, remind them that it is detrimental to learning to think this way.
Boost their confidence, tell them to say something good about themselves. Remind them that they are learning and that takes time. Relate a story about your learning experience. Remind them that today is the hardest and it will get easier.
Be their cheerleader.
We have gotten used to sentences like "cd into the spec directory and open the feature spec"
Work out how you are going to talk to your student before you start the day.
Perhaps run through a drill on the commandline so you aren’t all struggling just to communicate all day.
Use high level language but keep explaining it
So say something like this:
Coach: "Run the Rails server"
Student: "How do I do that?"
Coach: "rails server."
This is a very basic fact from...
It then clearly follows that...
Obviously, we have...
The proof is trivial…
Consider the following amendments:
This is a fact from...
It then follows that...
We have...
The proof is left as an exercise.
Now that the child elements are floated, obviously the parent element will collapse and we'll have to deal with that.
The word obviously is possibly the most common offender. Not everything is as obvious as you might think it is. That fact that you said it should be obvious might make me feel extra-dumb at a vulnerable moment. And what if it is not obvious to me? Does that mean I am dumb? That word doesn't help me. Sentences usually work better with that word omitted.
Basically you just bind the click event and call the function when it fires.
You could probably use a few more words and explain it more clearly. This is another case where the sentence is usually stronger with that word omitted. Let's take out "just" while we are at it too.
Simply add a new line to the router pointing to the new controller.
It might be simple, but it would read better without that word. It's an instruction, it doesn't need any flair.
Of course the retina images are too large for non-retina screens.
You should make that clear with words or diagrams that explain why, rather than just telling me something should be self-evident that may or may not be to me.
Clearly the function returns another function.
If it was so clear, you wouldn't need to tell me how clear it is.
Just open your vector editing program of choice and change the color.
The word just in this context is an add-on word to make it seem more casual and easy. There are better ways to be casual than adding words. Often times the word just can make a task seem like it should be quick and easy to do which it may not be. It is used to emphasize that something is not large, important, or effective when compared to something else.
More kilobytes means it takes longer to load. Everyone knows that's a bad thing.
If I don't know that, I'm immediately alienated and start to think that I'm reading the wrong thing. You can imagine variations like "As we all know,...".
Alter the X and Y coordinates to move the element to the new location. Easy.
An attempt to be reassuring and casual, but a frustrating bummer if what was supposed to be easy doesn't go so easily for me.