☂️ ITP: Work out a plan for getting sufficient pair programming time

[illicitonion]

Background

Every sprint of ITP (except the very first one), every trainee is assigned an issue called "Pair Programming": Spend an hour working with a volunteer on something.

Example ticket: CodeYourFuture/Module-User-Focused-Data#95

For most of the course, the suggested work to do is a codewars kata. For the very first module, because they haven't learnt any JavaScript yet, the suggestion is to spend the time pairing on any code-writing exercise they are doing (probably either an HTML+CSS project or a Google Sheets task).

What a volunteer needs in order to perform this task

• Enough technical knowledge to support the trainee in solving a problem.
• Ideally either experience in the programming language they're using, or significant (>5 years) professional experience coding.
• Ideally enough mentoring skills that they will almost never tell the trainee the answer to a problem, but will help them learn.
• 1 hour of dedicated time in a single block.
• Remote.

Ideally the volunteer would know roughly what the trainees are expected know at the stage of ITP (so they don't tell trainees they're doing something wrong because they're not using something they don't know about yet), but also, learning new more advanced techniques is sometimes appropriate and useful.

Note: There is no assessment part of this work. The goals are to help the trainees learn, and to give the trainees experience working with others.

How much do we need

1 hour per trainee per sprint.

How should trainees and volunteers match-make and coordinate

To be decided.

Probably we shouldn't have the same trainees and the same volunteers paired up regularly. We will have a mix of mentoring skill levels which we want to distribute, and also people benefit from different learning styles/interactions.

Currently we have two channels in the ITP slack: #cyf-codewars and #cyf-pair-programming. Some people have offered office hours in the codewars canvas. Others are making ad-hoc threads in #cyf-pair-programming.

How can we track this?

To be decided.

Ideally trainees would know this is expected, want it to happen, and be able to escalate when they're not getting it.

Acceptance criteria

Every sprint, 80% of ITP trainees have 1 hour of a pair programming.

In 80% of these pair programming interactions, the trainee feels like they learned something or found the experience valuable.

Volunteers are generally happy to keep doing these sessions.

Owner

??

Stakeholder

@illicitonion

Approver

@illicitonion

[illicitonion]

We discussed some of the logistics of this today, and settled on "every volunteer should have a calendly or similar" I suspect at some point we'll hit scale issues (checking 20 calendlys to find an available slot isn't ideal), but we can cross that bridge when we come to it.

I've split this into #136 for the "recruiting" piece, CodeYourFuture/curriculum#1077 for the guidance piece, and CodeYourFuture/curriculum#1081 for simplifying maintainable trainee instructions. That's probably sufficient for now.

[illicitonion]

Oh I should make a pitch slide for the volunteer onboarding too.

[illicitonion]

Left a comment on https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1rawXCCKbTj7t0Em48X1vxw3PxSYsVLYwAxDqsOgHsVU/edit#slide=id.g30abc708696_0_14 with information to include in the pitch slide.