Girl Develop It Ottawa

I am the chapter lead and an instructor for the local Ottawa branch of Girl Develop It, formerly lead by Serena Ngai.  We are currently working on incorporating GDI in Canada before we continue to run workshops.

As described on the main webpage:

It can be intimidating for women to learn and ask questions when they are in an extreme minority. While open and welcoming, today's budding developer community is up to 91% male. If we can empower more females with the confidence in their technological capabilities we can begin to change this landscape.

You can follow the happenings of Girl Develop It Ottawa via Meetup, Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr.

Intro to Scratch Programming

To kick off the new chapter, we decided to host a free, three hour workshop that introduced programming in Scratch, a popular visual drag and drop interface.

I designed and lead the workshop with great success.  You can download the slides and notes (PDF, PPTX), and read about our experience from my perspective and Serena's.  I also wrote about teaching programming concepts with Scratch.

Create Interactive Art and More! Learn to Program With Processing

In September 2012, I designed and taught a one-day workshop aimed at teaching programming fundamentals with Processing.  The majority of the day was spent looking at concepts and trying them out in code after each concept.  Then, the students worked on a tutorial of their choosing with the help of myself and our teaching assistants.

The workshop material is available here.

Learn to Program With Python

In June 2014, I designed and taught a Python programming class, split into two three-hour sessions.  As per the description:

This class is for complete beginners. In the first class, you will draw pictures with Python's Turtle module to learn core programming concepts including loops, if-statements, variables, and functions. In the second class, we will use these concepts to build a small text adventure game.

The class material is available here.