Making Educational Videos for Code Louisville

I volunteered to be a mentor for the latest session of CodeLouisville, on the .Net side.

No big deal, I thought.. and then, TreeHouse was unable to get their Entity Framework videos ready on time, so we, the mentors, volunteered to pick up the slack.

Naturally, I don’t do well when given an open ended problem, so I went into crazy-detail-mode.    I paid $15 for a 1-year subscription to https://screencast-o-matic.com/home  (VERY GOOD), and I started making videos.

And I ran out of steam.  Because, of course, I chose the slow, measured, one-thing-at-a-time approach, and I created far too much work for me to do myself.

Luckily, two other mentors suggested that we do X for our mentoring session – so if what I was doing was from top down, they were going bottom up.  Basically, show the fast way to create an MVC website, Code First, Scaffold, and let the students backtrack from there.

This worked VERY well.   It boot-kicked the students into effective land.  At least one of them showed me some working code in their project in the same week.

Lessons Learned

I am too. detail-oriented for my own good.

When in doubt, ask people what they need.

Sometimes, you just have to show the finished product and NOT explain everything, then go back and explain what is needed.   Its okay, people are resilient, they will survive Smile.

I like screencast-creation, but not more than a few hours a week: For a 20 minute screencast, it takes about 40 minutes of recording, about 2 hours of editing, another 20 minutes of rendering and uploading.   So basically plan on 4-5 hours for a 20 minute video on a topic.    Thus, I can probably sustain generating 10 minutes of educational content a week.

What Did I make

This is a walkthrough of LocalDB:   https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tTDKTQsfGPr_nFSbEifGQRc8dc-FfrxbPUfnc7CyKoc/edit?usp=sharing

This is a walkthrough of C# talking to SQL:  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lSt-C5-L3VwLLGE6oJO3A_UOpIu2lYA-EWMhzAo-Ye0/edit?usp=sharing – it has links to 5 videos, and (eventually) links to code in github.

Watching TreeHouse Videos Quickly

imageIn November, I signed up to be a mentor for Code Louisville.    It’s a program where people use TeamTreeHouse (as made available to anybody living or working in Jefferson County by Louisville Free Public Library) to study up on stuff, and work on projects, and if they need help, they can ask the mentors during their weekly class/lab.

For the first Two Months, I stayed current on all the videos, and quizzes, at TeamTreeHouse.  You can see that from my profile on the right.

Unfortunately, I do not have the 10 hours per week necessary to do this properly.   (Well, 5 hours for watching videos, and another 5 for working on a personal project). 

I still want to keep up (so that I know what the course is teaching the students, so I can help the students when they have questions), so now my mission is to stay up on videos, while not taking the quizzes that come after each video, in the most efficient way possible.   (Note: possibly Windows specific, YMMV):

Step 1:  Subscribe to the iTunes feed.

Every video lives somewhere like this: image

Go up to the “course” level URL instead: image, and there you will find the magic button:

image

The actual link address is something like this:

itpc://teamtreehouse.com/library/javascript-foundations.rss?feed_token=xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx

Which, if you convert it to http, and get it in a browser, looks like this:

image

I.E. It’s a plain old RSS feed.  However, the itpc:// causes it to open in iTunes as a podcast, where you get this:

image

Note. At first, you don’t get all the episodes – I had to tell it to “show old episodes”, and I had to click the little cloud icon to download each one .. there’s probably a way to do that easier.  I clicked on each one.  I was at work, so it downloaded fairly quickly.

Step 2: Watch them with VLC

Then, instead of watching the episodes with iTunes, I find them on disk, and watch them in VLC.  I go as far as to create a VLC playlist to get them in order:

image

Then, while I’m watching them, I can speed them up:

[ , ] Slower/Faster in 0.10x increments
If the speed gets higher than 4x, it cuts audio out
= Resume normal speed
Shift-Left-Arrow, Shift-Right-Arrow 3 seconds left or right

I find that watching at 8x, I can tell what the subject matter is fairly easily.  If I find something interesting, “=” + a couple of Shift-Left-Arrows, and I watch that at normal speed (or sometimes only double-speed).  

I just watched 3 hours of video in an hour.    And I don’t think I missed any detail.   Nice.

In another half hour, I can catch up to where the class(es) would have me be at.  

Code Louisville 2.0, Shelving Various Things, New Tech

Tonight was my first night of mentoring at Code Louisville 2.0.  I don’t know if I’d mentioned it before; I volunteered to be a mentor in a program that the city is putting together.  The City’s viewpoint is, we need more skilled IT people (there’s a shortage).  My viewpoint is, I get to help somebody who wants to learn, to learn something, is good with me.

It went pretty well.  The program is using Treehouse for the source of instruction; the Louisville Free Public Library made a deal with Treehouse to make it available to all library patrons.    The quality of the instruction is pretty decent, and it takes the stress off me for being a source of instruction.  Instead, i just need to share my experience with folks.  Some of them are right at the level of the instruction, some are much more advanced.  It keeps it interesting.

To keep the mentoring / labs interesting, I’m trying to do a mini version of a standup at the start, and then circulate amongst everybody to keep things personal.   I’m trying to keep a live document editable by all going as class notes / links / what did we decide.  I hope its a good example for them, of how to use technology to collaborate.

As a result, though, I’ve had to shelve my architecture build.  I simply don’t have the 4-6 hours it would take for me to go to LVL1 and print out the 3D parts of my house model.  Each part.   Times 8 parts.   Times 4 levels.  Without being a hog.  

My current geeky project inventory:

  • A family project: old 35mm slides converted into slideshow project for delivery at Thanksgiving (where I’ll record everybody’s commentary about what the slides were about)
    • I need to find decent screencast recording software that will let me create a DVD later.  I think I’ll be trying SnagIt.
    • Planning on using Picasa as the presentation vehicle.  My wife has already scanned in all the slides from the negatives.
  • One more birthday song, for my stepson, coming up in December
  • One last soccer banquet slideshow, as requested by one of the kids I know.  He’s a good kid, and yes, I’d be honored. To be delivered probably late November or early December, i don’t know yet.

I’ve also had an infusion of new tech into my life:

  • Samsung_ATIV_Smart_PC_Pro_700T_35511640_06_610x436[1]A Samsung 700T that I got off a co-worker at about 50% of the list price.  This is a Windows 8.1 (thanks Anthony!) tablet device with a keyboard that makes it pass off as a laptop pretty well.  I’m writing this blog post on it.   However, while in tablet mode, the near field pen thingy works perfectly.  It even does the “hover” thing that mice do, that I really miss on the Apple.    And I’m getting used to the flexibility of reaching up and touching instead of trying to force the mouse to get to a certain spot on the screen.
  • A whole house water pressure regulator to cap water pressure at 75 psi.   What was happening was spikes up to the 150’s, which caused the pressure relief valve on the tankless water heater to dump scalding hot water onto the concrete basement floor.

Running wise, I (barely) ran my last half marathon of 2013 (time: 2h48m).  Due to a calf injury, i could not train much – my longest run the month prior was 5.5 miles – but thanks to Mr. Calvin Spears of Occupational Kinetics, I got put back together.  They also used a cool app – it seemed to be called SparkLines, but i can’t find it anywhere – to measure me while I was running, and detect that my form is lop sided when I’m in my right foot.   Good stuff to know.   They also say they can make me faster. 

My running schedule is currently clear of all races.  I intend to sign up for the Polar Express series (3k, 4k, 4mi) which runs Dec-Jan-Feb, as a way to have a goal to stay in shape over winter.