How to make a fun, effective meeting with a program that benefits both beginner and advanced code machines

Question

If you could organize your own programming meeting, how would you organize a session so that people

• it was fun
• learned a lot.
• were able to participate, despite their level.

what topics, actions, tasks, etc. you would include (not all in one session, but overall)

how would you handle the different levels? What important things do you think to learn and achieve?

Any input is welcome. I'm not sure how Id is best suited, maybe leaving this community to vote for it.

Answer 1

Perhaps put a number of problems with different difficulty levels. Then the participants should form small groups and try to solve their chosen problem together.

• They should probably try to find teammates with similar levels of ownership.

• They must choose a problem that is complex and interesting for all of them.

• Using small groups can discussion and learning.

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http://uva.onlinejudge.org/ has many small programming tasks that you can use as they are or for inspiration.

Answer 2

A few ideas come to mind that you might want to continue researching:

• Code Camps is one of the ideas in which you may have different tracks depending on what people are interested in listening to and want to learn more about certain topics. In this case, advanced users in some cases represent more basic users, but it can be useful for various reasons, IMO.

• An off-conference conference is another idea when the group that appears determines what is being discussed and is a very interesting self-organizing conference. This can be difficult, because it requires facilitators who can extract from people what they want and then see that it bears fruit. Does anyone want to talk about continuous integration? Well, it depends on whether others want this idea to be implemented too. This involves an odd cost in terms of understanding that the one who comes in may be trained in the fact that their role is in activities such as those who simply watch, who may be quite disappointed, while those who roll up their sleeves and jump into this activity, may have a completely different experience.

Another key point is that you are trying to convey technical knowledge, form network contacts on various topics, try to reach consensus on issues such as agreement against configuration or something else? Sometimes it’s useful to just bring the community together and see what happens.

Answer 3

How about a webapp project where an advanced one can create fancy scripts and back-endery while students do HTML and CSS, but also let them see and try to understand what smart glitches do.