My First Ever Training Workshop

Today was one of the most important days of my entire personal project. It was the day when I conducted the training workshop for the ILP staff members. This step was extremely critical for my project. I had taken the responsibility of initiating a small number of children into coding however, the most significant step was to enable the teachers into taking this initiation forward and keep proliferating code literacy on a continued basis. Initiating the children was just the beginning however, sustaining it beyond my individual effort and enabling others to continue this was extremely important.

I was full of mixed feelings this day. On one hand I was relieved that I would not have to bother about any language issues as the ILP staff were well conversant with English and I was sure that I would be able to conduct the training with ease however, on the other hand, I was quite anxious that I would be presenting to group of grown-ups.. I was nervous that they would be able to catch the smallest of the slips-ups that I might make.

The ILP Chairman, Mr. Manmohan was also going to be attending the workshop and that was really exciting for me. He was gracious enough to arrange a conference room for me in a nearby IT office in order to accommodate the attendees. The earlier night I had created a power point presentation for the workshop. Even though, the main purpose of the workshop was to do a walkthrough of the Code.org® website and to make the staff aware of what all possibilities exist so that they could pick and choose what they wanted to teach,, I thought it was necessary to have at least a few slides before the walkthrough just to set the tone and give a better perspective about the workshop. The training workshop went on very smoothly. Though I had planned on having a one hour session I ended up extended it to two hours. Apart from taking them through the website, I also did a game with them to give them a real time experience of what the children would do. At the end of the session I collected their feedback which would critical to evaluate the usefulness of my training. I thanked them for their time and their feedback and bid my goodbyes.