Thanks to everyone who took part in last week’s meeting to talk about making screencasts. For our next exercise, you’ll be working in pairs to develop a short lesson, and then each person will teach it live, online.
- If you don’t already have a partner, please mail me and I’ll match you up. (Please tell me how much you know about Git and GitHub, and what time zone you’re in.)
- Once you have a partner, get a copy of our existing teaching materials from this GitHub repository. If you need help with this, please let me know: we have several volunteers who’d be happy to walk you through the process.
- Make sure you’re in the ‘master’ branch (not ‘gh-pages’ or any of the others), and look in the directories ‘python/novice’, ‘bash/novice’ (for the shell), ‘git/novice’, and ‘sql/novice’. There, you’ll find the materials we’re preparing to teach complete beginners starting in January.
- With your partner, pick a small topic—something you can teach in 3 minutes or less—and either fix it, rewrite it, or add it. (If you’re adding something new, please check with me first: we want to make sure this material stays suitable for beginners.)
- Once you’ve created something, submit a pull request to our GitHub repo. (Again, if you don’t know how to do this, we’ll help.)
- After your material’s been reviewed and integrated, we’ll set up a time for each person to teach it live online using something like a Google Hangout. You will not record video for this: instead, you’ll share your slides or your screen live and in real time.
Synchronizing with other people always takes time, so this will be a longer exercise than the previous ones. Ideally, we’d like to have lessons in and taught before the holidays, but if you’re unable to do that because of other commitments (like end-of-term madness at your university), please just let me know, and we’ll spill into January.