Thank you for mentoring! It's awesome to have you helping out :)
We'll have a large variety of experience levels and ages among our participants. Recommendations for coaching young participants. You will work directly with two participants. You'll hand out their instructions and materials and coach them through the coding steps. (Maker coaching will be done directly at the soldering stations.)
The coding instructions are deliberately incomplete so that each participant can customize their website. Help participants learn by encouraging them to:
- look up answers on the Internet (make sure they only find safe sites)
- experiment (try their ideas, making it clear it is okay if they don't work)
- guess (give them hints, not the answers)
Coders will spending all three hands-on sessions coding and can do all steps.
Coder/Makers will spend two hands-on sessions coding and one hands-on session making. They should complete steps without letter suffixes.
Makers will spend all three hands-on sessions making.
We're specifically not asking for last names, email addresses or locations from any workshop participant. Please use first names only and to personalize introductions, talk about why you like programming or making.
We're using a theme of famous women of computer science. This is to promote women in STEM and inspire the participants. Each tempbug is named for a famous woman. Participants will access sensor data from a tempbug and content on their website should be about their tempbug's namesake.
Participants should save all their work to a folder on the desktop called tempbug. This will minimize the chance of permission issues on Guest logins or participants losing their work on an unfamiliar laptop.
Since most of the participants are working on borrowed laptop, the workshop is designed to use native tools; i.e. Text edit instead of Sublime, ftp commands instead of Filezilla. We want the participants to be able to carry on without having a specific computer of their own. Unless the participant is an adult with their own laptop, don't recommend downloading any tools. Laptops provided by LTOL will have tools on them.
In order to be able to use native tools to make the index.html document for the website, you'll need to make some configuration changes on both Mac and PC. Generally, you'll find it easier to create the document, then edit the file name directly to make sure it is just index.html
Use Notepad on PC to create the html document. To run Notepad, type Windows + R, notepad. The default extension will be .txt To change this, use Windows + E for Windows Explorer, find Tools (XP), Organize (W7) then View (W8) and check the box required to show file extensions. The find index.txt in Windows Explorer and rename to index.html
Use Text Edit on Mac to create the HTML document. Use spotlight to find Text Edit then configure to allow creation of HTML documents with these instructions
To help participants during the CSS steps, refer to the sample styles To use the images, type the name on the images after the URL to display it, then right click and Save As to the tempbug folder. Be sure to include the following Google Fonts API in header of HTML document, <link href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Alfa+Slab+One|Permanent+Marker|Nova+Mono|Monoton|Press+Start+2P|Bowlby+One+SC|Cedarville+Cursive" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"> if sample styles fonts are used.
An example website based on the handout materials can be found at (http://workshop.womenwhocoderenotahoe.com) and the code for this example site has been uploaded to the website folder on this repo. There are 5 tempbugs (Pinoccio Scouts) in various locations near the venue and each participant will be given a card holding information required to access the sensor readings from one of these tempbugs.
At checkin, each coding participant will be given a card with credentials (FTP address, FTP username, FTP password) for their own personal website for use at this workshop and one month beyond.
- Mac use Terminal (search with Spotlight), PC use Command Prompt (Windows key + R, then cmd)
- navigate to tempbug folder on desktop
- ftp ftp.address.com
- enter ftp username and ftp password
- cd public_html
- put index.html (use put command for each file)
- quit
When helping coders find images or examples, make sure to talk to them about respecting copyrights and other intellectual property. If there is interest, discuss open course options.
Help new makers clip component ends; these ends are sharp. Have them turn their faces away. Try to capture clipped ends and throw them away before continuing.
Solder irons should be held like a pencil but make sure new makers don't hold their fingers too close to the hot part of the iron. They should 'choke up' on the handle part to keep fingertips safe.