Plan Engaging Workshops

Preparing for your workshop

In addition to your normal preparations for a workshop, we’re recommending you consider the following areas.

Workshop Examples:

• Resume Building/Cracking the Technical Interview

• Day in the life of a software dev

• Intro to Python/GitHub/C#/AI/ML/Insert tech topic

• Intro to *their API*

Hosting your workshop

You should prompt your attendees for active participation. You’ll need to focus on keeping your participants engaged and active. We’re recommending starting with an icebreaker to ensure everyone knows each other. One of our favorite ice breakers is to ask each attendee to share their name, where they go to school, and something cool they learned about recently. You should also build time into your schedule to do breakout sessions, troubleshooting, and questions.

As you’re working through the workshop content, be extremely aware of how intimidating code reviews and questions will be for participants. Remind participants that if they’re facing an issue others probably are as well. You’ll have to ask them to share their screen to troubleshoot their issues.

After the workshop

When you finish the material in your presentation make sure to sign off and thank everyone for their participation. Encourage the presenter to continue hanging out with attendees. Have a channel in slack/Discord so hackers can ask follow-up questions about the workshop topic after it ends.