Retrospective notes, Apr 5/6 SF Railsbridge

[Sameer Siruguri]

Hi -

sorry about the delay in posting this out. The SF Railsbridge event at Omada Health on the 5th and 6th was co-organized by the folks at Omada (Melissa Glickman, Ian Norris), David Ladowitz and me.

The Omada folks handled the student retrospective - the dominant theme across both were the issues with getting Windows to install the latest versions of Rails. The teacher/student ratio was commented on as being great, as was the food provided by Omada.

Student Retrospective Notes (scroll past this for the volunteers retrospectives)

What Worked
Idea	Votes
patient volunteers	5
the food	5
pair programming part	1
volunteer knowledge shar	1
Slack channel for communicating info--maybe use it more?	0
level of knowledge appropriate for group	0
going through the basics	0
getting to understand the foundations	0
interactive learning	0
2 to 1 student:teacher ratio	0
seperation; pulse checks	0
installfest	0
splitting	0
What Didn't Work
Idea	Votes
Talking for more than 10 minutes at a time	1
the food	0
Definition of "advanced"	0
windows install	0
where do we plug in our computers?	0
Dongle Drama	0
the damn AC	0
security constraints -- bathrooms	0
lots of info packed at the end	0
'	0
What Could Be Improved
Idea	Votes
Windows Rails Documentation	7
More of an agenda to set expectations for what is going on in day; installfest links to have people try at home and only come if need help?	1
Survey or quiz to better self-group	0
Better signalling of volunteers and how to escalate to the right volunteer	0
better communication of need of installfest?	0
PC oriented group for installfest and day of?	0
more pair programming?	0
More hands on activities to show our learnings (quiz? assignment? reiterate?) good The code pairing session we did were useful. It got everyone into a speed that was helpful to them personally.  We talked to the group beforheand to get different ideas for pacing the content  Having the high vol to student ratio was very good , though bigger student groups get more questions that ppl can share amongst themselves.  Bosco spent time in the beginning, with the Green Group, explaining HTML and CSS and then tied it back later to the Rails view code and asset pipeline which was helpful for the students. not good We started not knowing what to do exactly; pairing helped us figure out what to do It's hard to know where to start with more advanced students  Maybe beginners class went a bit slower than they could go because they were bottle necked by the slowest group. Separating it out further, esp when there are so many volunteers, might have helped.  There were lots of problems with Windows with installfest and in starting off the Green group  Can we try to have students analyze their "machine state" beforehand, to understand how to help people with different existing versions? General Feedback Could we have had a 1:2 ratio across all the students when the volunteers are available?  It would depend on how comfortable teachers are with teaching  It depends on the diversity of students' experience levels  Can we set up docker for windows? Or can we show ppl how to get to LDE on Win10? Looks like repl.it has created a full IDE - we could recommend that instead.	0