Hosting workshops
Yesterday I had the pleasure of hosting my first workshop of the year for try! Swift World and I had a blast. The topic was SwiftUI and Core Data, and I had prepared a ton of content for the workshop. I wasn’t sure if we’d be able to cover it all.
It’s always hard to scope out exactly what you’ll cover in a workshop due to it’s more or less flexible nature.
When you work on a conference talk, you know exactly how much time you have, and you can adapt your content, pacing, and topics on your time window. You know that you’ll be able to speak uninterrupted and questions are saved until the end of the talk.
In a workshop, you plan for audience participation. Attendees will do some work on their own, and they’ll be able to ask questions as you go. Sometimes these are questions related to the materials you try to cover, other times you’re helping an attendee resolve a compiler error that prevents them from following along.
And even though this flexibility makes it hard to plan a workshop in detail, it’s my favorite part of hosting a workshop.
Being able to interact with people, and dive deeper into topics they’re interested in, and helping them learn something new through conversation is one of the most satisfying things when teaching.
Back to yesterday. I had prepared a lot of content, and wasn’t sure how much of it we’d be able to cover. I was especially a little uncertain because this was my first time hosting this specific workshop.
Luckily, everything went perfectly fine. We managed to get into all the topics I had prepared and the attendees were able to ask any questions they had. We went a little bit over time to cover all the questions but it wasn’t too bad.
I look forward to hosting the workshop again in a couple of weeks. At the same time, I’m working on a more in-depth 4-hour version of the workshop. For more information on the long version check out this page. If you’re interested in the next try! Swift version of my workshop, keep a close eye on their website. The next edition will be announced soon.
Cheers, Donny
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