I’ll give you three things to think about when designing a technical course, such as teaching python, excel, or data science. But first, let me ask you.
Have you ever struggled to learn how to code early in your life? I know I did, and I always wondered if I was not cut to understanding how to code and understand how computers think.
In high school, I enrolled myself in an intro to computer science class and lost interest. I did not learn very much and had a bad experience. In university, I enrolled in a few programming courses as well, didn’t learn very much, and also had a bad experience. It seemed that all of the best students didn’t attend class and studied on their own. It made me wonder, is teaching tech hard or were my instructors missing something?
Post-university, I attended a bootcamp, and I finally learned how to code. Today, I teach data science (at a bootcamp), and I design lectures.
What do these bootcamp instructors know that make them effective at bringing someone non-techincal to be technical.
1 Effective instructors spend a lot being aware of their target users.
Implement the UX practice of creating 1-2 personas of your course. Hash out those personas and always reference them when designing a lecture. You may understand a concept easily, but put yourself in the shoes of that persona, can they?
2 Effective instructors use the show and tell method.
When teaching something very technical, do a live coding session while explaining new concepts. Make errors, debug them live, show the real side of coding (making errors all the time) and have your students code along your process. Nerve-racking, but it’s human.
3 Effective instructors don’t spend too much time on the theoretical, emphasizing more on the business context / real-life use cases to each new concept learned.
As important as the theory is to understand in order to be an effective programmer or data scientist. Our personas want to get the inuitive/ high-level sense of a concept and its use in practice. This is how you get non-technical students interested, and once their interest is peaked. They will dive into the theory and first principles of that theory themselves.