[group-organizers] ChiPy's Mentorship Program

[Nicholas H.Tollervey]

On 16/05/15 00:38, Christian Long wrote:
> Nicholas kept track of time, and made sure the groups weren't getting
> stuck or designing more than they could build in an hour. He also made
> sure we gave our full attention to the speakers as they were
> presenting their team's project.
> 

Put simply, I was very politely in "teacher" mode. ;-)

In London we call this person the cat-herder because, well... I'm sure
you can work it out. ;-)

There are now about 7 of us who cat herd regularly (we rotate). It's
actually a *lot* of fun because you get to see how the different groups
are solving the problems in a different way (I often think stuff like,
"just wait until group 2 find out what group 4 have done" etc...).

Basically, you call out the time left every 15 minutes and walk around
the groups making sure they're on task (and getting them back on track
if not), or asking questions of them so they're thinking about all the
right sorts of things (for example, "all the groups except group 5 have
addressed such-and-such aspect of the problem, I'd best ask group 5
about it"). The right sorts of questions to ask tend to fall out from
observing what all the groups are doing.

I guess the important thing is to only allow yourself to ask questions
rather than suggest solutions.

"So how are you going to do X..?"

"I see you've done Y, but what happens when Z is the case?"

"You're obviously nearly finished, do you have tests to prove it works?"

etc...

;-)

The "show and tell" bit at the end is where the cat-herder works hardest
because everyone wants to contribute and there's a lot of friendly
banter between teams as they discover how they've all solved the same
problem (but in different ways - it's fun to see "aha" moments). In
London we simply say:

* Show us the code running (or not, in which case we want to see it
failing). This is usually one person from the group explaining.

* Talk us through the code and the process you went through to get to
the current state. Usually, *everyone* in a group wants to tell you
about their contribution.

* Questions from the floor.

Think of it as a public many-to-many code review in a supportive (and
often humorous) atmosphere. Since everyone's head is in the same problem
space, people are quick to see the merits, strengths and weaknesses of
different solutions.

It's my favourite part of the evening.

In case you're wondering what it looks like in the London dojo, here's a
video of a team at last week's dojo demonstrating a dancing game they'd
coded:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spdZky4v6vk

(In contrast, my team used the turtle module to generate a "dance" on
screen).

Here's a rather less silly example from a couple of year's ago (we were
generating game worlds - the team demoing have done something akin to
Age of Empires)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28czn3hA9NY

N.


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