Tutorials Welcome Tutors
========================

Dear Tutor for SciPy 2013,

In less than two months you will be teaching a hopefully awesome
tutorial for an audience that is eager to learn and to interact. This
year we expect to have a record in attendance, so you should be
prepared to cope with a potentially large number of people in your
classroom. In order to help you having success in your endeavor, we
have listed some points for your consideration during the preparation
of your materials.

* All installation steps need to be done well *BEFORE* the tutorial
  to ensure success. Tutor need to post detailed installation
  instructions at least *2 weeks* before as well as an installation
  testing script. We will contact the students informing them that
  they need to make sure they are setup for the tutorial before the
  tutorial start as no installation time will be scheduled during the
  tutorial. They will be encouraged to visit the tutorial page to find
  your material and come to the class with their computer already
  setup.

* People expect you to *teach* them, independently on how much you
  know about the subject. So avoid the temptation to explain too many
  different things, and rather *focus* on a few, that is, the ones
  that you consider are more *fundamental*.

* You should try to make people to *think*, and most specially,
  to *type*. Better than having too many exercises, it is generally
  better to come with fewer that let people more time to think. Also,
  making the implementation of the solutions for exercises short will
  avoid unnecessary stress and will allow more exploratory paths for
  students.

* Expect a wide range of abilities in the students, even in
  intermediate and advanced.  This inevitably leads to new folks
  complaining the material is to advanced and vice versa.  One way to
  deal with this is to have a couple of groups of exercises, e.g.,
  introductory, intermediate, and advanced.

* Don't depend on internet access too much.  While we don't expect
  problems, the worst thing is to expect everyone coding on your
  IPython notebook server in the cloud and no one can get to it. In
  fact, we encourage you to bring a few usb's with your materials that
  can be passed around if folks can't connect.

* Encourage *group creation* (groups of two, three or four people) so
  that discussions can appear easily. That reinforces the learning
  experience.

* It is always sane to plan your tutorial well ahead of time. Make
  sure that you can have a preliminary version of your materials ready
  *2 weeks* before your tutorial, so that you can make them available
  (without the solutions, of course!) to the students prior to the
  tutorial.

If you have further questions on any of these points, please feel free
to send them to this mailing list: tutors2013@scipy.org.  The tutorial
chairs will try to help you as much as we can, and the other tutors in
the list may want to help each other too.

Finally, it is important to remember that teaching is an art: students
want to learn, but they also want to feel as if they have some control
over themselves. Try to put your knowledge at work and make them learn
things that they feel they can control. If you achieve this, your
tutorial will be a very rewarding experience, for them, but specially
for you.

Thanks and good luck!

Dharhas Potina
Francesc Alted
Tutorial chairs for SciPy 2013