When The Master Is Ready, The Students Appear

There is a famous Buddhist Proverb which states “when the student is ready, the master will appear.” But like Steve Blank did in his 2010 Lean Startup Conference speech (and many of you know I follow his teachings like a disciple), I’m going to rearrange the proverb to “when the master is ready, the students appear.” I’ve been placed in a situation where I have to perform and deliver on all of the philosophies on idea design/creation I’ve developed over the years.

And such is how I started my teaching journey yesterday with a group 8th-10th graders from the organization Youth on the Move. The objective is to have the class build the organization’s website over four weeks, and maintain it moving forward. Going into the first class, I didn’t know what to expect. As stated earlier, I’m using this experience as way to get better at keeping things simple/breaking complex concepts in easily digestible bites. But I’m not a trained teacher. And I have little to no experience with kids.  So I did what what any self-respecting teacher would do:

I modeled the 4-week lesson plan after Steve Blank’s Lean LaunchPad Customer Development class at Stanford. Duh.

And just like Blank, we were going to teach the students web design like people teach artists: a combination of theory + immersion into the web design experience.

Yesterday’s (Week 1) outline consisted of:
– Introduction of the instructors (Justin Dawkins and I), and how we got started with websites – The reason we were there

– Our teaching method
– Components of websites
– Site Content
– Homework Assignment

I’m sure anyone who has dealt with 8-10th graders during the summer is laughing at me right now.

First Lesson Learned: No 14-year old wants to talk website theory – especially at 4pm on a hot summer day. (But I adjusted on the fly, and the class ended up going relatively well.)

The first real shocker came at the beginning of class. As the time crept to 4:05pm, I kept waiting for more kids to walk in the class, but no more came: the entire class was made of up girls. In all my years of dealing with websites, I’ve never seen a room full of black female web designers. And this presents a great opportunity to make a real difference, and open their eyes to the possibility of pursuing this as a career path. Hopefully, I can line up a female web designer/developer or two as a guest speaker.

The students are being treated as if they’re running their own web design startup. During the class, we discovered one of the students is a little bundle of energy so Justin recommended we split the class into two two teams: Customer Development and Product Development. The ball of energy will lead one of the teams. I’ll guide the Customer Development team and Justin will guide the Product Development team.

The class was given three tasks for homework to be finished by next Wednesday:

1) Come up with a name for the startup

2) Individually interview the Program Director (the client) in order to get the site requirements

3) Create their own blog using WordPress.com, and post, at least, one entry (note: we are using WordPress.org as the framework for the site)

While giving out the assignments, I learned some things about keeping things simple. During the theory part of the class, I discussed the different users of the site (donors, kids, parents, volunteers, etc), and I originally asked the class to interview one person out of each user type. Ummm, that’s a little too complex for these kids, so we scaled it back to the Program Director. Next, I actually only asked them to create their own blog on WordPress.com, and I assumed they would play around with it, and post an entry. One bright student pointed out that the creating a new entry should be required (therefore forcing the students to play around with it).

All in all, I had a great time, and learned a ton. Next week, we’ll begin to put together the site design.

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