Feb 5, 2018
Workshops (I try to put online what I teach)
Hello!
I am fascinated with the process at play while forming an understanding of a concept. Equally, I am keen to explore how such an understanding can be passed on.
How can I be most helpful to a student to build their own understanding of something that already makes sense in my head?
What I have discovered so far is that building up concepts in small chunks is crucial and metaphors, especially when drawing them on paper are very effective.
As I am working with students - I do so right now largely in the form of workshops and office hours, but am hoping to gain real classroom experience - I want to continue to explore this subject as well as document what I learn about teaching while practising it. Teaching is learning.
A drawing from an earlier blogpost about the transformation of abstract concept representations
I am recently trying to put past and current workshops I have taught onto this website. While doing so I notice that documenting workshops is difficult in its own right, delivering a concept in speech (and gesture and in a dialogue(!)) is a different challenge than describing it on paper. Above that, and what sticks most out to me as I am typing my notes down, online workshops/tutorials can get really long.
Should I be repeating myself like I would when I talk? Should I mention things just once? Should I modularise my workshops and link in between them? Should a github tutorial explain command line basics or just reference a command line workshop I have documented elsewhere?
Again, I keep exploring and will try to keep adding both more thoughts and more written pieces to this page.
First steps with Python - for participants with some programming experience (e.g. p5js or Processing)