Welcome to the Muses Code JS community! We’re glad to have you. Here’s a rundown of what a typical Muses workshop is like.

Ready? Set. Go!

Timing

Muses Code JS is designed to be a one-day workshop. However, sometimes an event could go longer or there may be a mentoring info session a few days before.

Prior to the event, if you aren’t already a member, you will be sent an invite to the Muses Code JS workspace on Slack.

Along with the time you spend actually mentoring, we encourage you to introduce yourself on Slack and be an active and contributing member of our online community by answering questions, posting resources and keeping in touch with your mentees.

If attendees aren’t able to finish all the workshop content on the day (which is absolutely fine), we encourage them to keeping going and as a mentor, you are encouraged to continue helping them, if you’re able to.

Workshop Structure

The structure of our workshops vary a bit from city to city, so your local organiser group will be able you to guide you through the details. Usually there’s a pre-event meeting or info session where you can ask all your questions.

Our workshops promote and provide a safe, fun learning environment for attendees to learn at their own pace, with mentors to assist as needed.

Keep in mind that in many instances, attendees have little to no prior coding experience at all, have never opened a text editor, or even know what a text editor or GitHub is! So please be patient and proactive about checking in on our participants as they progress through the day.

At the start of the workshop, we’ll give a brief introduction to JavaScript, then participants will be grouped in tables of 5-7, with 2-3 mentors assigned to them. They’ll work through the prepared content at their own pace; as a mentor, your job is to help and guide them - like a coding sherpa!

During Muses Code JS events, we use tutorials that have been written specifically for our workshops. You’ll find them on our GitHub.

Installation

There is a lot to learn in the workshop! Attendees will have more time to learn if they are able to get everything installed as quickly as possible, but may need help with beforehand, namely how to:

• Download and install a text editor (we recommend Visual Studio Code)
• Use the developer tools in the browser (we recommend Google Chrome)
• Download the tutorial files from GitHub and open in a text editor

We recommend pointing attendees to the README as this takes them through some basic setup steps and some introductory material. It is of course fine to discuss the material and answer any questions they have, as we want them to be able to start coding right away!

Our Approach

Our tutorials are completely beginner-friendly. Attendees literally don’t have to know how the internet works - we will explain it all!

We avoid technical terms and we don’t assume that attendees know anything already. Try to explain things with real life examples and always try to explain the bigger picture. Let attendees explore the material and understand it on their own.

The tutorial is designed to expose attendees to the fundamentals of JavaScript as a programming language and its purpose in web development. It is also very important for us to show that dealing with errors is a part of being a programmer. When they go back home, they should be able to find the solution to error messages on their own.

As much as possible, we want our mentors to follow some guidelines, described in next sections.