Speaking to students

Given there is a chance, I'm eager to give a tech talk to any kind of audience which is willing to have a listen. Part of the fun of giving a speech is of course also learning something about the subject and also, improving myself as a speaker.

Two of the most recent talks I've held this year have been to the local university IT students. Having been one of them in the past, I knew that giving them something uninspiring to do would be something they are used to. The challenge would be to figure out something actually fun which can be accomplished in a matter of a couple of hours.

There are countless blog posts and tutorials about how to talk to students, but I decided to ignore them and wing it.

I gave two assignments to choose from. First one was to make a DVD screen saver with JS. There was a short-lived internet meme about it earlier this year, and I thought that hey this could be fun. It turned out to be quite amusing to watch at least especially when mixed with the second assignment which was to program a simple music loop with SonicPI.

I am not a fluent and a confident speaker, and because of that, I usually avoid trying to be funny. That does not mean that the subject of my talk or in this case the technical assignments should be boring. Personally, I dislike the usual pure algorithmic challenges merely because they are everywhere: in interviews, homework, language examples, etc.

Last week, I demoed my working style in an adult education course where the students with previous IT background catch up with modern web and mobile technologies. Together with my colleague, we created a simple voting system for the parliamentary elections this spring. Contrary to the earlier presentation, here the subject was rather dull, but that redirected the focus to my daily routines. The discussion and questions were directed towards my tech choices (in this case, Nuxtjs) and not to the domain which was beside the point.

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