Guides for mentors about mentoring learning exercises

[angelikatyborska]

The groups of mentors per track is much bigger than the group of maintainers. Thus most mentors didn't create the syllabus and might not know it very well. A lot of mentors are probably fluent in the language so they might not even want to bother working through it. And it's hard to memorize the dependencies anyway.

To make sure that the mentor doesn't require the student to use concepts that weren't taught yet, the mentoring UI could:

• somewhere visible show a "learning exercise" tag
• somewhere less visible offer a list of all concept prerequisites for this exercise

[iHiD]

@angelikatyborska

Agree with (1) as a prominent thing.

For (2), would you be happy with a section at the top of the guidance tab that shows:

• The Concepts taught be the exercise
• The Concepts learnt by the student (so not just the prereqs, but a list of all the things they've done so far)?

@taiyab I think this would be a powerful quick win if you fancy adding it to a design once you've found your feet :) Also Tai, it would be good to think about if we can expose what is under guidance, so people know if this is there without having to click to see, and if there's mentor notes, and auto feedback. Could we add icons onto the guidance tab to signify this somehow?

[angelikatyborska]

For (2), would you be happy with a section at the top of the guidance tab that shows:

• The Concepts taught be the exercise
• The Concepts learnt by the student (so not just the prereqs, but a list of all the things they've done so far)?

Yes, that sounds reasonable. It will inform me of the goal of the exercise (learn this one specific concept), and steer away from mentioning concepts that the student didn't learn yet.

I wonder if it would be even more useful if there was also a list of concepts that the student didn't learn yet? Maybe like a table with two columns: concepts learned and concepts not learned.

[taiyab]

@angelikatyborska @iHiD Yep, definitely with you both on this.

In fact, some of this is stuff was being contemplated during the initial design, but just didn't make the cut (as there's already so much!)

Let me get a feel for all the other feedback and I'll definitely incorporate this in.

[taiyab]

The Concepts learnt by the student (so not just the prereqs, but a list of all the things they've done so far)?

In order to attempt the exercise, they need to have learnt the pre-reqs anyway, so this needs a bit of thinking. Also, I suspect we just wouldn't show it if the person has disabled learning mode.

[joshgoebel]

I just guided a student away from using ternary on the ternary exercise [Ruby track] because I (as a mentor) had no idea it was the ternary exercise. Then the student pointed it out to me, LOL. I think in Ruby guards are a bit nicer there but had I know the exercise was ternary I would have just said "great job" since their solution was otherwise fine the first time around.

Even if I did all the concepts myself I'm not sure I'd remember 3 months from now which is which.

[ynfle]

I just guided a student away from using ternary on the ternary exercise

I was that student

[michallepicki]

I think even an "Introduction" tab similar to the "Instructions" tab, with the exact same content that shows above instructions when solving the exercise would be very helpful

[taiyab]

@angelikatyborska @iHiD

After reading the thread, I'm thinking the Guidance tab should look something like this:

(Tab names subject to change, ignore the missing icons)

1st tab shows all the the concepts the exercise teaches, 2nd one has an outline of the student's current progress on the track (I'll scope this out in a little bit).