Description of a techie party game to encourage casual peer learning
Feel free to fork!
As played at the PyLadies party before PyOhio 2015.
If you just want to chat and nibble, feel free to just do
that! You can do as much or as little of this as you want.
And feel free to say, "Not now, maybe later."
It's just meant to liven up and add variety to the
conversation, so if you're already enjoying the conversation,
that's good enough!
Is there some skill you'd like someone to introduce you to? Write "Teach Me (whatever)" on a sticker and wear it under your nametag!
As you chat and meet others, if you see someone with a "Teach Me" tag that you can help with, offer to take them to a laptop and show her the ropes!
Make sure the teacher doesn't do all the typing; ideally, the learner should be the one at the keyboard.
Don't bog down too long - if you take on a big topic, just spend a few minutes getting a quick look at the first stages of it, or at some particular part that puzzles the learner.
After your lesson, feel free to wear a new tag requesting a new topic!
Research says that one of the best ways to learn is to teach others. So, once somebody teaches you something at a Teach Me station, change your tag to "I'll Teach (whatever)" and see if somebody wants to learn it from you! And yes, wear your "I'll Teach" badge alongside a new "Teach Me" badge.
Every time you teach a skill or learn a skill, put a star on your nametag. Before you leave for the night, show an organizer how many stars you've earned. We'll give out two prizes: 16 GB USB drives in lovely, approximately-Pythonic green. One goes to the person with the most stars, and one randomly selected from everybody with any stars.
If someone teaches you a skill that's on their "I'll teach" tag, take a bonus star, too. This is a bribe for you to help others solidify their learning with teaching!
Ask for anything you want! But if you've got no idea, here are some possibilities.
- Python! (aka total beginner)
- Lists
- Dicts
- Functions
- Classes (object orientation)
- Magic Methods
- File I/O
- Database access
- Iterators
- Decorators
- Unicode
- Abstract Base Classes
- Python 2/3 Differences
- Web Scraping
- Unit testing
- Mocks
- Git pull requests
- IPython
- IPython Notebook
- Ansible
We just made this peer teaching exercise up. Please give us feedback about how to improve it! Participate at your own risk. Any injuries sustained during peer teaching are solely the responsibility of the Columbus Ruby Brigade.