WWGLondon & GoBridge beginner's level workshop - DRAFT

This repository is forked from **Natalie P's: Go for complete beginners** course: https://github.com/Pisush/go_for_complete_beginners

Originally, the course was written as a part of GoBridge's training modules for beginners level. WWGLondon together with GoBridge ran a workshop called Learn to code with Go! in January - February 2017. This is our version of the workshop, which was tailored to fit in three Saturdays instead of six meetings.

Go for Complete Beginners: In a nutshell

• This workshop is designed to teach programming principles using Go.
• The targeted audience are people with no coding experience.
• The length of the workshop is ~18h, this can be broken to 3 classes of ~6h each.
• Our typical class runs from 10am until 5pm on a Saturday, including a lunch break and a couple of short coffee breaks.
• In between classes, the instructors are to be available on the Gophers slack to answer questions.
• This workshop is loosely based on the workshop that was held by Women Techmaker Berlin on 2016.
• The content of the course outline is an adjustment of How I Start to be complete-beginner friendly, with the kind permission of Peter Bourgon (as mentioned on the original repository).

How to read this guide

• Most weeks have a theoretical part and a practical part.
• The theoretical part should be discussed in a group and the instructor can show an example.
  • Each bullet point and sub-point should be mentioned and clarified.
• The practical part can take place in the playground or locally, depends on the week.
  • Each bullet point and sub-point should have an exercise or two done by each participant.
  • As those are mostly basic elements of the language, the instructor is encouraged to think of local version. e.g.: practice the fmt library to print a sentence relevant to the recent news.
• The homework part are exercises the participants will do at home between the meetings to repeat the material and can ask about on slack.

Instructing tips

• Asking “is all clear?” or “who didn’t understand?” is not enough. Many participants are shy or afraid to ask a stupid question.
• Some approaches that worked in the Berlin chapter:
  • Remind participants that there are such thing as stupid questions.
  • Thanking and responding that it was a good question.
  • Speak slowly and repeat the keywords (both new and previous terms).
  • Get the other instructors to walk in the class and ask each participant at least once during the meeting “what questions do you have?”
• When a difficult technical question is asked in the group discussion, invite the person to discuss this during the break.