MIÀM - Teaching
Skills used
- Typescript
- Angular
- Working as a team
- Teaching (obviously)
- Writing and documenting
Summary
Jonathan and I taught the basics of Angular to a class of ~20 students (one day live + several hours of coding and problem solving videos + exercises + tests).
Context & project aim
At Institut G4 the final annual projects are managed by fifth year students and the third year students join them for one week during the production phase. As the front-end technical leads of the project and because we knew most third year students didn’t know Angular at all, we decided to get ahead and teach them what we knew before the start of the common week.
Choices
One of the first things we did was building a big Notion page with explanations of some Angular and Typescript concepts that would serve both as course material and as reference for the students. We prioritised the concepts we anticipated they would use the most during production.
Because we knew that one day of teaching would not be sufficient for anyone that didn’t know it before to at least be at ease with Angular, we also prepared exercises reproducing common problems and videos of us resolving them.
Problem solving strategy
One of the key challenges that we faced was how to keep track of the students’ individual progression. That is why we set the training goals even before starting writing the course, and a series of questions evaluating the level of a student relative to these goals. We made everyone (even fifth year students) answer these questions individually so that we could assess who needed the most training.
And most importantly, we made everyone answer those exact same questions after we trained them. Now we, the students and even the Institut G4 administration had a proof that the training was useful and not a waste of time and efforts. Great!
I didn’t realise at the time, but it was a lot like implementing software tests on our students!!
Lessons learned
- In the context of teaching, it’s usually better to switch regularly between explaining concepts and implementing them, rather than explaining a lot of concepts and then trying to implement them all at once
- You have to adapt a lot to your audience, not only individually (how a specific person operates/learns) but also as a whole (the dynamics between people), and this can be very subtle
- Teaching something is definitely one of the best ways to get better at it