We’re happy to report we headed one of Le Wagon’s workshops to share a bit of knowledge and talk with their students.
Le Wagon is a coding school based out of 44 cities in 25 countries. They bring coding skills to creative people who aim to create their own startup or add technical know-how to their skillset.
We got an invitation to head a workshop at Le Wagon Tokyo, their local chapter, which also runs free weekly evening workshops on top of their paid intensive program. It’s open to everyone who wants to learn a wide variety of topics from HTML, CSS, JavaScript and many more web development related topics.
It’s been an honor to work with such a top brand. So let me show you how we prepared for it.
First, designing the content for a 90 minutes workshop is unexpectedly challenging. We’re not sure whether it will be too advanced topics or too simple to be valuable content.
The target audience was supposedly a beginner so we decided it should be just an introductory topic on building web applications with Django.
To see whether it can fit within a 90 minutes duration, we decided to hold a trial session a week earlier. We advertised this to local tech communities and managed to draw about 20+ registrations, where 12 showed up on the event day.
The pre-workshop went very smoothly and it seems to fit well with the 90 minutes duration. But mistakes always happen.
For the pre-workshop, we’re doing it over Google Meet and I’m using the same setup for the Le Wagon workshop, which was held over Zoom. I didn’t realize Zoom only supports sharing the whole desktop screen instead of just a specific window. And a horrible thing happened.
I’m sharing my whole desktop with my Gmail window opened. Fortunately nothing sensitive showed up.
For the Google Meet setup, I have one main window which will be shared and another side window for me to do other things. So if you’re using Zoom to present, you might want to have a second monitor instead.
UPDATES:-
While editing this post, I’ve been told that Zoom does support sharing specific window so I checked again and this time, I think I can see options to select specific window. I guess the panic simply clouded my views at that time.
After doing two online workshops, we can conclude that building engagement with the audience is very hard.
We had high expectations that the participants would actively join the session while the fact is, many just wanted to see what’s on the table. We’ll have to rethink our strategy for future workshops on how to make the participants more engaged during the session.
Le Wagon has made the recording of the event available on their Youtube channel. So feel free to go through the videos to see how we built simple forms with Django and integrate it with our GetOTP API to verify the email address.