Session 1
Plan it
- Who
- Learners aged 14 to 18. No coding experience needed. Runs entirely on paper, so it works before the account question is settled.
- Where this sits
- Define and Decompose
- They leave with
- A named audience and one sentence about what that person leaves knowing
- A rung chosen off the ladder, with a reason
- A filled board, third column gated
The arc: 45 minutes
- 5 min
Hand out boards. Name the project and the audience in one sentence each.
Who is visiting, and what should they know about you by the time they leave?
- 10 min
Walk the ladder. Five rungs, one example each. Learners pick one and write why.
- 20 min
Fill the board. First column takes two kinds of knowing, marked.
- 7 min
Pairs swap boards. Each asks the other about one line in the third column.
How would you know if that came back wrong?
- 3 min
Collect the boards or make sure they are in bags. Nothing is built today.
Look for
- Boards where the first column lists facts about a hobby rather than about the person. The project is a page about them; a page about skateboarding is a different, easier project.
- A rung chosen with no reason written next to it. The reason is the part that gets checked in session three.
- Third columns filled in before the first. You cannot say what to hand over until you know what you hold, so the order is doing work.
- Learners who want Generate because it sounds best. Ask what it would produce that they would not want on their page.
- Anyone finished in five minutes. Read the board rather than taking the finish as done.
- Pairs run it on each other, then you spot-check three. Point at one line in the third column and ask how they would know it came back wrong. You want a check you could run yourself.
Tips
- The ladder goes on the wall, not just in hands. You will point at it for the rest of the track.
- One rung each, chosen and stuck to. Two interactions half-built is the most common way this ends with nothing testable.
- Paper only. The tool being shut is what makes this session work, and it also means the track can start before accounts are sorted.
- Running short, cut the ladder to three rungs shown and skip the pair swap. The board cannot go; session two starts from it.
Print before the session
Nothing gets built today, and learners are told that at the start rather than discovering it at the end.
The project is a page that introduces the learner, which makes them the only person in the room who can judge whether the content is right. That is the point of choosing it: the checking is possible before any research happens.
The ladder is the other half of the session. Five rungs, and this track runs at the top two, where the page holds on to something. Picking a rung is picking how you want to be known, and it is a design decision rather than a difficulty setting.