A little over a month ago, on September 19th and and 20th I gave two joint one-day seminars at Cuyahoga Community College's Corporate Center and I wanted to take a minute to reflect on my experience. The collective seminars were labeled by the college as a 'Javascript' seminar but when considering the materials I was given to cover the scope of the seminar was a bit larger than that.

The materials on the first day focused on the concepts and ideas related to Object-Oriented Programming; some of which fell outside the scope of the Javascript language considering that Javascript is only object-based and not a full fledged object-oriented language. I had to communicate what it meant for a program to be object-oriented and what the advantages were to using things like classes and objects. It also branched into talking about the software development life cycle as well as software planning using UML.

The materials on the second day were an introduction into the syntax and capabilities of Javascript as applied to web development. I spent most of the day explaining variables, operators and control structures. We also spent a lot of the time doing activities that got the students actually implement some of the predefined objects to cause actions to happen in a browser window.

The class was composed of a quite diverse group. There were a handful of young professionals, a few non-technical managers, and a couple established professionals from the IT field. I actually had a good conversation with one of the IT people about her journey to reestablish her skill set. She was a longtime mainframe developer; lots of COBOL experience. She wanted to know what kind of languages/technologies should she be reading into in order for her to evolve with the next generation of technology.

Both days went rather well and I had more material than I could realistically cover; which I would consider a good thing (at least better than trying to fill the leftover time). In that regard I found it a little hard to decide on the spot what I should skip in order to push though the bulk of the material in the given
seven hours of lecture.

On the second day there were some problems with one or two of the activities that the book provided; the instructions were rather vague and very confusingly written. I looked over each of the activities ahead of time but when came for me to try to decipher what the instructions were trying to say, it was a little troublesome. I got by the issue relatively easily because I knew what the book was trying to get across; so I just came up with modified exercises on the spot and had the students do those instead. It gave me a chance to provide more clear cut activities that better represented the material.

The students filled out course evaluations, but I have barely had the chance to talk to my course director about my reviews, she is somewhat difficult to get a hold of. The time I got her on the phone she said the reviews were good and she even mentioned the idea of me doing more of them, but she has yet to send me copies of the student evaluations.

Overall I really enjoyed the experience and I could really see myself getting into teaching. It was a lot of fun to try and pass my knowledge of a topic onto someone else.