RIOT learning solutions - request for input

Tutorials & HowTos
10

General information on RIOT learning solutions

After speaking with 5 people from the community about learning solutions for RIOT newcomers, I have found out the following about learning solutions for RIOT newcomers.

There are three different tutorials/courses available:

  1. ‘Regular’ tutorial

  • This is the first made tutorial, intended as first drop-in for newcomers.

  • It works from the shell in the terminal, no hardware needed

  • It needs updating, because it is outdated and can be confusing. For example, there are already 2 ways of ‘setup’ described on the front page.

  1. RIOT course

  • Intended as the leading tutorial during summit (before corona).

  • This uses Jupiter Notebook, via browser, no hardware needed.

  • License CC-BY-ND, so it cannot be adapted and redistributed.

  • Nice start for who wants to use RIOT for research work

  1. Tutorial and exercises for students of HAW and TU Dresden

  • This has first been made for the RIOT summit +/- 2017.

  • This material is used for teaching at HAW for some years now, TU Dresden will start using it this semester. Both links lead to the same content; a different link is used to prevent confusion for students of both universities.

  • Hardware is used in these tutorials, so students learn to use RIOT on hardware.

My findings on preferred ways of learning RIOT:

  • Beginners differ in preferred way of learning. Experienced (and mostly 30+) users prefer written explanations and documentation. Younger users (students) often prefer a combination of written and video explanation.

  • Most people prefer to first get an overall introduction from someone, before doing a tutorial by yourself. Also because tutorials 1 ‘regular’ tutorial and 3 HAW/TU Dresden tutorial are not intended and suitable to be completed entirely on your own (not sure how this is with the 2 RIOT course).

  • Everyone likes it when there is a real person available to explain and ask questions to. This may be online or offline. For online asking for help, it is preferable that the beginner knows the person (s)he asks questions. Otherwise the threshold for asking help is high, because of fear of asking dumb questions.

Recommended improvements, mentioned by the interviewees and myself

Tutorials

  • The tutorial is not findable from the main RIOT page with information about how to get started. Can there be placed a link to ‘regular’ tutorial 1 at that page?

  • Indicate at the start of the tutorial what skills are required to successfully finish the tutorial. For example: makefile, build system, git, Jupiter. This allows the person who wants to do the tutorial to easily see if they meet the requirements.

  • Make an overview with links to the non-RIOT specific training materials needed to start with the RIOT tutorial (for example: makefile, build system, git). Place this link at the start of the tutorial, with the ‘skills required to successfully finish the tutorial’. This allows the person who wants to do the tutorial to brush up their lacking knowledge themselves so that they will be able to successfully complete the RIOT tutorial.

  • Improve the ‘regular’ tutorial 1 with good parts of the RIOT course 2 and Tutorial and exercises for students of HAW/TU Dresden 3. This is a big(ger) task, checking out the material of all three tutorials and decide on what content could be added where.

Create more elaborate examples

  • Write an extensive example, work everything out in detail. For example for use model. So that you instruct people with such example where to find the information, so that they can find such information themselves.
  • Mark solutions on questions in the forum the same way as stack overflow, just as has been done with this post. This makes it easier for beginners to find solutions to questions that have already been asked on the forum.

Encourage beginners to ask questions

  • Encourage beginners to ask questions in more places. Have mentioned in all beginners documentation that you may absolutely ask questions and where they can do so (forum, chat). Put this in the tutorial, in the ‘getting started guide’ etc. So that it is everywhere and a beginner hopefully feels a lower threshold in asking questions. “Have doubts? Ask us!”
  • Create a matrix chat for RIOT newcomers. This may lower the threshold to ask questions, because it is intended especially for beginners. Explicitly show that we care about newcomers.