I’ve been asked by the The Department of Psychology to put together two training workshops for E-Prime and Authorware, which we currently use for different types of experiments. This seems a great opportunity for me as I enjoy teaching so much. If the training works well then there has also been talk that it could be included into the undergraduate course, even rolled out to outside companies/universities ‚Äì though obviously in an expanded format. However, after the initial conversation and surge of ideas came the dark cloud of realisation. It would seem that some people are under the impression that a short workshop of possibly a couple of hours will be enough to take them from “never programmed before” to “being able to do pretty much anything they want”. Oh, and one more thing: they want the first run of the material after Easter. It was at this point that I felt like putting my head in my hands and crying.
Anyway, after thinking about this, I’ve decided that even with a tight time frame and misconceptions about programming, I’m going to take this challenge and run with it - though I‚Äôm still not exactly sure in which direction I‚Äôm going to “run”. One option would be to try and do what these non-programmers believe is possible, i.e. teach them everything in a short space of time. Whilst this may work for some people, I personally think that more people will be confused and left by the wayside, which could turn people off programming. Don‚Äôt get me wrong, if you‚Äôve programmed before I’m sure this could work, but in this situation the majority will be non-programmers. An alternative would be to simply teach the basics. Get each person up and running with the basic ideas and concepts of each language and then suggest that they play around on their own. This might be a good solution, but can you really cover and make sure everyone understands the core concepts in an hour or two? I‚Äôm guessing on this, but I suspect it really depends on the language and what you consider to be the basics. For example, if we were talking about Java, what are the basics? Personally, I think the basics in Java are things such as variable declaration, operators, and defining and using classes. But can you really cover all that information in a way which non-programmers can understand, retain and reuse within such a small amount of time?
If you have any thoughts about this I would love to hear them. In the meantime I‚Äôm going to explore a third option. This third option is to try and teach the basics within the workshop and then look at providing some additional online training (or what you might call e-Learning). This sounds like an ideal solution, however, how do you create “good” e-Learning material? Are there any rules for such training materials and, if so, what are they? What technology should be used to create this training material? For example I could use Authorware or Camtasia as I have access to both of them, but is there another technology which is better to use for this type of stuff? In fact a better question might be does this style of learning actually work for programming or do you simply just create people that can re-produce particular items? Again any ideas and thoughts welcomed.
