presentation is not so easy to make

I started leading a beginner Python workshop this past Tuesday and Thursday at school. It didn't go too well from what I can tell. I lost like half of the students on Thursday. I hope I can see them again on next Thursday.

I learned my lesson.

1. don't pay too much attention on pretty slides
They become useless if they don't help. I was attracted to Google HTML5 Slides  since I attended the 2011 I/O recap here in New York. It was really cool to see that. I thought why not make one for my workshop?
I spent so many hours on it and I thought I could write the scripts either in reStructureText or Markdown, but it turned out most of these libraries out there are sort of "broken". Their CSS don't work very nice. I ended up using Shower and did the entire thing by hands. Yeah. Hard-code all the htmls myself.
Next time, I will stick to traditional powerpoint.

2. limit the goals
At first, I wanted this talk to be as comprehensive as possible. Although I had a couple juniors and seniors from CS came to learn Python, but most of my students don't have programming experiences at all.
I modified my slides a few hours before the talk. I realized the goal must be lowered to introduction to programming. Enough to get by. I still ended up too much.

3. test your equipment
Don't rely on previous experiences. They break and they change over time. For example, the first workshop (which was actually my talk on Python and introduction to programming), I spent nearly 30 minutes trying to hook up the projector and fixing my slides. Freakin' mad....
On Thursday I had to deal with this thing called PyLab and I didn't know how to run a script (I can drag the .py file into PyLab to let it execute but it sucks..). I planned to write little script on IDLE and I couldn't.

4. get a better room
Seriously... 7/107 sucks. That projector requires me to turn off the light which is a terrible thing. I hate that. Students have to keep turning their heads over me.... that's bad for teaching.
None of the CS labs are setup such that the computers can face the projector. That's why I asked for the engineering room at first because it has a good setup...

Anyhow, I posted my stuff here
http://yeukhon.bitbucket.org/