Spreadsheet Workshop Post-mortem

25 November 2017

A quick update to say that I ran the workshop on spreadsheets and it went well. 10+ people attended, and everyone seemed to learn something, and appreciate having concrete tasks to work through.

I started the session with interactive (screen projected, demo + questions) and quick overview of how to “fill down” to create sequences, and a refresher on absolute and relative cell references. The rest of the session I walked around to guide people when they were stuck (mostly encouraging them to look up functions in Excel help or online). At one point, after everyone had struggled through using VLOOKUP(), I walked through the task myself with everyone watching. I think that was helpful to clear up any misunderstandings.

Takeaways:

Learners like bite-sized tasks, and the self-directed format
The intro on cell references was useful even for people who thought they understood relative and absolute referencing
Energy really lagged after the second hour. I think everyone had been working solidly without breaks for two hours. Next time I’m going to really encourage people to break, and only run the session for 2 hours.
2-3 hours was enough time to get through Parts 1 and 2, but not enough time to even get started on the Data Carpentry lesson
Some learners liked the “Big Ideas” summary as way to check that they understood the important concepts (hooray!)