Make Drupal introductory/training material more fun and engaging

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svenryen's picture

This is an idea and reflection after trying out the Hello Drupal material from Acquia for a group of students.

While I think Hello Drupal is a marvelous and professional piece of work, nicely laid out, with a great compendium that covers the drupal basics in an excellent way, I found it very technical and less engaging.

Material that teaches an entirely new concept needs more of a "fun" factor. This might go hand in had with the typical notion that it's sometimes really hard to do something quite simple with drupal (which i think was pointed out in the closed thread).

An introduction should seek to inspire and generate curiosity. It needs to show off the full potential of Drupal.
Get them hooked first - later they will come back asking you to teach them the basics like blocks, nodes, etc! Mind-blowing introduction material might also serve the purpose of a selection mechanism, so that we can keep attracting the smarter part of the audience ;)

The highlight of my session with students (seen from the student point of view) was not even in the material at all. I saw most smiles and attentive faces when I moved over to the terminal to use Drush for a while because Internet failed and we needed to skip Drupalgardens and set up a local install.

Comments

examples welcome!

heather's picture

Hello Sven!

I created the Hello Drupal materials specifically to fit a typical meet-up group or Drupal Camp. Often, we were finding at our own events it was hard to accomodate people who knew what Drupal was, but sort of turned on their Drupal sites and were saying "huh?"

But I agree, I would like it to be more fun and engaging. I do think there should be more FUN materials. Have you seen the Headfirst series by Kathy Sierra and others? What examples of materials do you find engaging? (Non drupal related is OK!)

Maybe your idea could lead to a new presentation or a new course? I had a dream that if I won the lottery I'd commission the Drupal Manga :)

Hello Drupal is used in a variety of settings, and it would also be nice to "facet" that course so it can speak to the needs of specific sectors/groups, e.g., not-for-profits, small business, students, educators, gov't employees, etc.

To that end, this year, I started working on "Drupal for Decision Makers" which would be a 35 mins long presentation which you could use as outreach itself or to add-on to a Hello Drupal session. The Drupal for Decision Makers addresses the needs of a specific niche, and starts by telling a story about someone the audience can relate to. My first tested one so far is Drupal for Government.

You mentioned in the closed thread: "Surprisingly, CMSes are often not taught in education, sometimes there are not even classes that teach open source technologies or php."

Are you teaching Drupal this autumn? I'm searching for educators to form a group to see what we can share and how we can learn from each other:

Call for educators: https://www.acquia.com/blog/drupal-goes-college
Please also join the Curriculum & Training group too!
http://groups. drupal.org/curriculum-and-training

Engagement example

btopro's picture

This year at Drupalcamp PSU (2012) we wanted to make things more engaging and real to people by building something throughout the first day. So during our Site builder day we had a series of presentations that all were building on top of each other. The use case was to build a distribution for creating a department of drupal-ology website.

This peaked the interest of more advanced developers because they could see some of how building a distribution on drupal.org works while still getting into some of the nuts and bolts of content types, publishing workflows, and views. We also started out with a base distribution so that people didn't need to know drush or what our recipe was, they could just download our instance of drupal called Nittany.

We also screen recorded the day though the audio is a bit poor at times. This way people could get the distribution and see what we built during the day so they could play along at a later day if they so chose. You can find all resources for the day here -- https://drupal.psu.edu/dc2012 but I wanted to share cause I thought it was a bit unique in how we tried to train people about Drupal this year.

Great introduction to Drupal dev on a USB key

stevepurkiss's picture

I use the fab Drupal Quickstart: Pre-made Development Environment, just discovered a version of it called DrupalPro which has a great informative wallpaper!

Only local images are allowed.

I used to print & give out packs of two disks - one with a Linux distro on and one with Free software for Windows at networking meetings to encourage people to try it out.

Could do similar with USB keys - give them out at various events, to students, etc.

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