This is a recipe for teaching new coders how to contribute with open source projects. It also serves as a practice for validating feelings of uncertainty that learners often and shows them how these feelings can be fertile ground for improvements to the open source project and prompting larger conversations amongst other community members of the project.
In open source projects there is often a power dynamic between maintainers and newcomers where maintainers decide what is important and newcomers obey. Open source doesn’t have to be like this. As someone who helps maintain p5.js, I learn from newcomers often! Newcomers are experts on how easy it is to learn a tool and often have other unique and valuable perspectives to share.
This recipe was adapted from an assignment I created for the p5.js Approachability Lab, which took place in 2019 at UCLA under the advisement of Lauren McCarthy and was based on prior workshops