Restrospective

[JonNorman]

A place to track:

• student feedback
• mentor feedback
• changes that need making

... ugh you all know what a retro is.

[JonNorman]

• names section should be just after turtles
• could rename the print statements here, one student was confused about whether the string literals in the print statements had some causal relationship with the if condition. Maybe rename to "The statement was true!" and "The statement was false!"

[NataliaLKB]

8 out of 14 people came. It worked out well in the end because we had one mentor for two students

[susiecoleman]

What went well:

• Everyone came back for both days
• Attendees were keen to learn
• Attendess were patient when working through problems and very receptive to trying to work things out and not just being told the answers
• Generally worked well together and discussed issues they were having
• The 1 mentor to 2 students ratio worked very well
• They learnt things
• They really enjoyed the office tour
• The morning challenges went really well. The first challenge was a really good start to the course. The morning challenges were a very good lead in to work later in the day.

What could be improved:

• An afternoon break would have been good
• Having something to get them out of the room both days so they get a break

What went well with the content:

• Turtles challenge
• The concepts that the course covered were really good and not too Python specific, lots of transferable skills.
• 2 days was a good length for a course, but if we'd had 3 days we could have completed the full material.

What could have gone better with the content:

• Name section should be right after turtles
• There was some 'magic' we didn't cover instantiating classes or importing
• Too much jargon sometimes e.g. method, function used before defined. Need to find the trade off between having a certain amount of 'magic' to achieve things and things being interesting.
• Not all students used cheatsheet, should have links to the cheatsheet or printed it out. Perhaps needed greater encouragement to use cheatsheet.
• Need to be careful of mathematical terms e.g. rational and natural numbers
• It would have been better to build on previous exercises in later sections with new concepts rather than having new tasks each time. Have less new challenges but instead improve previously written code.
• Certain amount of repetition in the material, in some sections there were too many exercises.
• Introducing raw input very early on would be useful or introduce variables earlier. It would be good to get away from hard coding data as soon as possible so that the output of the program is not always the same to make things more interesting. What you need to know to understand raw input and what you need to know to use it are very different so introducing it early should not be an issue.

Talks:

• All the talks were very interesting all the speakers did a good job
• Some of the talks were a bit too complicated and could have maybe been simplified.
• Good time of the day to have the talks (after lunch)
• Talks started discussions later in the day about how to get into tech

Lead up to the course:

• Very time consuming required a lot of hours both in and out of work.
• The diversity and work balance was challenging to manage
• It would be useful to see if we could have delegated more

What next?

• We would like to run it again we have the material now
• We can get different people to do it or wait for volunteer days to refresh. We had more volunteers than we could use this time so we could definitely run this course again with different volunteers.
• Write a community blog post on it. Break it up into sections and each person write a section. We want to promote what we've done and why we did it. We also want to get feedback from the students to include
• Provide further resources for the students and give them an anonymous feedback form.
• T to do a handover of how to organise the behind the scenes of the course for next time.