Retrospective for outreach event - June 14th 2018
What went well
- About 80% of the whole class enjoyed it.
- On the whole, we achieved our objective to enthuse them about robots and programming.
- Setup and tear down went well!
- The tour was good.
- We presented ourselves professionally.
- The kids got an experience of debugging, troubleshooting.
- Teaching methods:
- Andy: Learn by doing, read guide->test code in short blocks
- Nick: Go through intro->Get compilation->Get movement->ITERATION!
- Dan: Sit by the student whilst they read the guide and prompt them as they do something.
- The team that didn't go on the tour did the best!
- We didn't kill any of the robots.
- The arena was designed such that they couldn't fall off.
- The talk at the start was good.
What could be done better
- 20% unenjoyment
- The tutorial was too advanced for the age range
- Not everyone could program :(
- People tried to execute python in C++.
- People tried to execute the tutorial code.
- We assumed people knew programming, data types.
- The day was too short, 2 hours is not enough to teach them all the programming.
- The tour was too long.
- The volunteers weren't really familiar with the mbeds/C++.
- There was a bug in the start code. Missing }.
- The LED library isn't very useful.
- Demo code -> Move function
- Not everyone knew about move functions.
- It also had an int return which could cause confusion?
- It was on the 8th floor of the maths building
- The school booked it late, heck.
- Not all groups were the same size.
- 2 is too small. 3 seems to be ideal.
- The robot at the start didn't really work.
- Low battery - we probably didn't have fully charged batteries in the box.
- If we did run the competition, we didn't have the prize :(.
Measures to implement
- Write a tutorial that has real code.
- Host a session for the volunteers to get familiar with the event - work through the tutorial sheet and make sure it works.
- Make the guide more clear that it is a reference not a guide.
- We can also write a step by step guide.
- Investigate micropython.
- Dan investigated: our MBEDs don't have enough RAM :(
- Adopt the university approach: assume nothing, teach from the ground up.
- RUST!!!!!!!!!!
- Write a wrapper library for the MBED
- Put all the code in a while loop in the main function.
- Use a longer day.
- Remove all of the kids
- Group of size 0 solves all the issues.