Microsoft Coding Workshop Again

I like teaching people stuff, it's not because I am smarter than the others but because of my ability to make stuff difficult easier for people to understand. However, no one thinks I would be a good teacher. Sometimes when I jokingly say I want to be a teacher, almost everyone around me would say I'd be a bad influence on students (誤人子弟) because of my "shamelessly low" boundaries and the "sick and weird" metaphors I used when I explain something technical to others during work. And regarding my "special power" Mom has an explanation which is quite convincing - everything I've taught is actually easy as fuck (her exact words), it just seems difficult to me. That really hurts. So when I got the chance to teach again, I immediately took it and I couldn't wait to show them my true color.

Apparently I had been really GOOD last time when I taught the Coding Workshop for Microsoft in InnoCarnival 2014 so I got hired again to teach a class last Thursday as part of the Microsoft's GirlsSpark Camp this year. But this time it was a little bit different- unlike last time, my audience would be a bunch of university girl who were about my age and instead of teaching Kodu, I had to teach another MS's invention, called TouchDevelop.

It should be easy, since TouchDevelop has already got a bunch of tutorials which have already dumbed down everything to the point that as long as you follow every step you are guaranteed to be able to create an app like Flappy Bird. Even a 5-year-old could do that, but that's the tricky part. My audience were not just any university students, but STEM university students. I would be out of my mind if I thought they would be satisfied with an app like Flappy Bird. So my partner Connie (she was a former intern in ASM!) and I had a little arrangement and split the an-hour-and-a-half workshop into 2 parts. She would be teaching Flappy Bird as an introduction for one-third of the time and I would teach something more complex for the rest of the time.

Since I thought the place would be hard to find since it was inside the Wan Chai Exhibition Centre, I checked in at the Ivey Busincess School at 11:30am, which was 30 minutes earlier than the others. Great! Now I would have more time to do the preparation. And lucky to everyone for me doing that, as the Wifi there was not working! And no Wifi meant we would be doomed, big time, as TouchDevelop was a web application! So my coordinator Eleanor asked the staff there to fix it. That situation continued till the other 3 tutors arrived. We had nothing to do so we wandered around our classrooms and damn! The other 2 tutors (who would be teaching Hour of Code) had got a larger classroom than us! It'd got a Microsoft banner (which we didn't have) and there was a name tag with student's name on it on the desk for every seat there (which we didn't have neither!) And what we got was, well, a classroom.




At least our classroom'd got great view, which was nice...




At 12:30 pm, the students were showing up and the Wifi situation persisted. There was nothing we could do but using Connie's roaming service for the Internet. As we were waiting for the students to settle down, we heard they were separated into differnt classes. So the Hour-of-Code class was for business students whilst the others (the STEM students) attended our class. No wonder they got a classroom that nice. Pfff... we science students care more about the knowledge than a fancy classroom! Anyway, we asked them to open their laptops and tried everything they could to connect to the Internet (they mostly connected to the government's free wifi, not stable, still worked though). Then we started the class.



Surprisingly, those students took almost the same amount of time as the kids back in the InnoCarnival to learn how to create that Flappy Bird app. But now in retrospect, it is quite understandable, as some of them actually had zero coding experience. Being too optimistic, I wrote a little script which let users upload a picture or sent a message and then plant them on their current locations, which some of the tutorials in TouchDevelop had already covered. I also added an picture-uploading function. Therefore when it was my turn to teach, I had to take out two-third of the material I prepared, considering their learning pace and the fact that I only got about half of the time left when Connie handed me the baton.




Everything was a bit rush but still, I managed to make it in time to wrap things up. I left them my email address so they could ask me for the PowerPoint file if they wanted. Based upon the number of emails I've received, I would say I had successfully aroused their interests in TouchDevelop. Thank God!

If you wanna check out the script I wrote, here is the link: http://tdev.ly/qvrn
And if you want that PowerPoint file, there you go: link

Last but not least, a big thank you to Miss Eleanor Leung, my coordinator at the event, who had generously let me share the pictures here.


Kev

P.S.

Due to laziness and business, I sent my Christmas cards to my foreign friends 2 days before Christmas. And when I thought I was the one who did this way too late, Johnny kicked it up a notch and sent his on last Monday. Anyway, receiving this card still made me so happy, thank you very much Johnny!



And here's another thank you message, to Chum. Thank you for the post card! In return, I'm gonna do a little advertisement here promoting Chum's blog about her life in Hong Kong, as a "鬼妹": https://hkabc.wordpress.com/


Microsoft Coding Workshop Again Microsoft Coding Workshop Again Reviewed by Kevin Lai on 7:13:00 AM Rating: 5

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