I try to do something this when I'm teaching classes. Do the "why should I listen to this? What's it going to get me?" bit right at the start.
Give some examples so folks can decide if it's relevant to them, then show them how to do it (with follow-along coding or a hands-on lab if at all possible), and only at the end dive into how it works.
That way, even if people zone out partway through, they may have learned something useful.
Last time I tried introduction to programming classes I introduced concepts in the following order: variables (store results!), if-else (actually get interesting results!), then arrays (lists of variables!), for-loops (iterate over your lists!), which seemed to make sense.
Comments
I try to do something this when I'm teaching classes. Do the "why should I listen to this? What's it going to get me?" bit right at the start.
Give some examples so folks can decide if it's relevant to them, then show them how to do it (with follow-along coding or a hands-on lab if at all possible), and only at the end dive into how it works.
That way, even if people zone out partway through, they may have learned something useful.
Last time I tried introduction to programming classes I introduced concepts in the following order: variables (store results!), if-else (actually get interesting results!), then arrays (lists of variables!), for-loops (iterate over your lists!), which seemed to make sense.
Do you have any more suggestions?