Good points, thanks. It's so easy to overload them, because one wants to teach them every little piece of gold that's in there. I think it was in one of the old XP books, where there was this graph that showed which practices were supported by or enabled other practices. I would love to see something similar for the capabilities in Clojure. It would make it easier to see what can and can not be cut out from an introduction course.
My plan was to do something like this: *First half of the day* 1. install Leiningen and learn the basics 2. get everyone an editing environment, with the option of using either Emacs, IntelliJ, or Eclipse 3. teach the basics and let everyone follow along in their own environment *Second half of the day* Either: solve a smaller problem, like Game of Life, Langton's ant, or something similar or: just build a Compojure web app, and incrementally improve this, and have it deployed in CloudBees or Heroku There are a few basic things that I think they need to see: - how do I get started - how is code modularized and packaged - how can it be deployed and executed - how does Java interop work - how do I handle the regular problems I have previously used for-loops to solve On Saturday, 15 December 2012 23:57:48 UTC+1, Marko Topolnik wrote: > > There is one advice I can give from my teaching experience: don't > overwhelm them with data. A person can assimilate only so many concepts in > a day, no matter whether the workshop lasts two or eight hours. > > Pick a few key concepts and spend much time on approaching each concept > from many different angles. Have everyone involved with exercises. Make > layered exercises: each of those ten people is going to progress at their > own pace. Allow enough time for the slowest ones to get through the basic > part of the exercise, but have a stash of extra stuff for the quicker ones, > so they don't get bored and frustrated while waiting on others. > > On Saturday, December 15, 2012 11:13:21 PM UTC+1, ulsa wrote: >> >> In a couple of months, I'll have a whole day of teaching Clojure to ten >> of my colleagues. They are experienced Java programmers, but otherwise >> Clojure rookies. Any tips on how to structure such a workshop day? >> > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
