While one of the sometimes toughest parts of organizing a workshop, doing this well can often make the difference between really happy workshop goers/volunteers and frustrated ones. The links to the forms, with important instructions for using them, lives on the pre-workshop tasks page.
It can help to try and define the different grouping levels as follows. Feel free to combine/create class levels depending on the folks who sign up for your workshop.
- Beginner: Has never really worked with any programming languages.
- Advanced Beginner: Has worked with other programming languages and may be familiar with programming concepts, but has not worked with functional programming, Clojure.
- Intermediate: Understands programming concepts like functions, loops, classes. May only know about Clojure without having actually used it themselves.
- Advanced Intermediate: Has written their own programs many times but may not have worked with Clojure, Git or Heroku before.
- Advanced, no Clojure: Advanced work in another programming language, but new to Clojure.
- Advanced in Clojure: Has written Clojure applications before. Possibly a good candidate for teaching or being a TA.
Once students have filled out the form, it should be relatively easy to assign them to a group. Here's one way to handle grouping:
- Group as many people as possible before the workshop
- Anyone who hasn't taken the survey when they check into the Installfest should take the survey before proceeding to the Installfest
- At workshop check-in, either hand attendees a card with their level, or simple tell them and ask them to remember or write it down
- If someone didn't attend the Installfest and also didn't fill out the form, ask a volunteer to check their install and have them take the survey then.
There are a few ways to do this. Follow your heart.
Thursday before Installfest:
- Based on the survey results, create preliminary volunteer groupings to teach the needed groups. Group sizes should be around 5-7 (bigger groups may be broken down to use the ‘flexible’ volunteers outlined below).
- Create one or two additional ‘flexible’ volunteer groupings to cover attendees who have not filled out the form yet. They may end up as TA’s distributed among other classes, or as their own class, depending on who shows up on the day.
- Send an e-mail to the volunteers, letting them know what Teacher/TA groups you’ve paired them into. While noting that this may change depending on actual attendance on Saturday, also note the potential attendee class level you are thinking of heaving each teacher work with, so they can prepare.
Workshop Morning:
- Based on the number of attendees in each group, adjust the classes each volunteer grouping will teach as necessary.
- 20 minutes before the introduction speech, take each teacher to their teaching area to get set up.
- Give a TA from each class a card with their level it, and have them stand over to the side while the introduction speech is happening.
- At the end of the opening presentation, have the TAs announce which class levels they are each helping with, and ask the students to go to the appropriate TA.
- If there are several sections of a class level, subdivide the attendees between the TA’s for those classes. Have the TA’s bring their students to where the teacher is set up.
- Reiterate that people should feel free to swap classes if they'd like.