🧑🏾‍💻 prep

How do we build a community of self coordinators?

🔖
  1. we learn together 📼
  2. 🥁 rhythm of the week
  3. 📅 calendar
  4. 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 day plan
  5. morning orientation
  6. study groups
  7. backlog
  8. tasks and ratios

Rhythm of the week

Learning Objectives

Self-coordinating as a community poses challenges. One challenge is working out not just what to do but when to do it. This gets harder when we are working on different schedules. To make things even harder, we use a flipped classroom model: very different from a regular school.

To solve this problem, we use the rhythm of the week.

gantt title Rhythm of the week! dateFormat YYYY-MM-DD tickInterval 1day weekday tuesday axisFormat %A section Trainees Prep :2024-01-09, 2d In-person session :2024-01-13, 1d Backlog :2024-01-11, 5d Demo :2024-01-12, 1d

This rhythm supports trainees to plan their work during the week while still allowing flexibility in people’s different schedules. In a typical sprint week, Tuesday is the starting point with in-person sessions on Saturdays serving as the mid-point in the week. We use Sundays and Mondays to reflect on our learning and finish off any backlog tasks.

Calendar

Learning Objectives

Join the Global Calendar

Each day has an activity, and each week has a rhythm. We use Google Calendar to keep track of our activities and rhythms. Subscribe to this calendar and schedule your own week.

Each Meet link is permanently available in the calendar event, so you can join at any time in the day, not just the suggested time. It’s a good idea to make a plan with other people to meet at a specific time.

Day plan

Learning Objectives

Cohorts meet once a week in person. Together, we develop our understanding of the topics we are working on this week. We use a day plan to organise this day. A day plan is an agenda with workshops, study sessions and activities to make the most of our time together.

There’s a day plan for every sprint of every module. Each day plan lists a series of activities, with timings, instructions, and links to resources.

Find the day plan for the first sprint in the first module. Read the day plan. It’s your plan for class day and if you click the times, a countdown timer will start. ✨

💡 Tip

You can always navigate to modules from the menu. Hit ⌘/ to open the menu, or hit the three dots in the header.

Morning orientation

Learning Objectives

Early in most day plans, we use the morning orientation to gather the community together. We nominate a time-keeper and a facilitator (if they weren’t already nominated during the week).

Most sections have written down objectives. It’s useful to know why we’re doing something, before we start doing it.

Steps 👣

  1. Find a day plan view where the morning orientation is used
  2. Read the learning objectives on the morning orientation
  3. Volunteer to be the facilitator or timekeeper (you don’t need to volunteer every week!)

Study groups

Learning Objectives

In a flipped classroom, we spend our time in class focused on active learning: we need to prioritise time and space for trainees to work on their backlog independently in small groups.

Steps 👣

  1. Search for study group on the curriculum website
  2. Find a day plan that uses the study group activity
  3. Read the instructions
  4. Read the learning objectives for the study group

Backlog

Learning Objectives

In software development, we break down complex projects into smaller, manageable parts, which we work on for a week or two. These periods are called “sprints.”

A sprint backlog is like a to-do list. It lists what the team has decided to work on this sprint. It’s chosen from a larger list, usually called the “product backlog,” which holds the entire project to-do list.

The backlog is a set of work designed to build understanding beyond the concepts introduced in the course prep. For your course, we have prepared a backlog of mandatory work for each sprint. You will copy these tasks into your own backlog. You can also add any other tickets you want to work on to your backlog, and schedule all of the tasks according to your own goals and capacity. Use your planning board to do this.

You will find the backlog in the Backlog view on every sprint.

Copy the tickets you are working on to your own backlog. Organise your tickets on your board and move them to the right column as you work through them. Here’s a flowchart showing the stages a ticket goes through:

flowchart LR Backlog --> Ready Ready --> in_progress in_progress[In Progress] --> in_review in_review[In Review] --> Done

Tasks and Ratios: Capacity Planning

Learning Objectives

This section is for volunteers. To evaluate your capacity to run a class, here are some rules of thumb:

How many learners make a class?

Fewer than 8 is too small. A class of 18 is a good size. A class of 30 is too large.

How many volunteers do we need?

1 volunteer can support 3-5 learners.

What does a class do?

The basic tasks are:

  • Morning workshop on class day
  • Afternoon study group. You can also do the following tasks during study group, or async online during the week:
    • Code review: at least one per learner per sprint
    • Step review: one per learner per module
    • Pair programming: at least one per learner per module
    • Demo: attend at least one demo by a learner per module

There are additional beneficial activities you can support learners with:

  • Rhythm of the week
  • Mid-week study sessions online
  • Codewars club
  • Socials, games nights, meetups