Consider adding a "where we're going to" at the beginning.

[jamespjh]

On softwarecarpentry-discuss EthanWhite said:

On Sun, Nov 3, 2013 at 10:34 PM, Damien Irving
d.irving@student.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
I was speaking with some people who attended a bootcamp a few weeks ago and
they were lamenting the fact that until the afternoon of the second day,
they didn't really understand the point of a lot of what was being taught.

This is definitely a very common piece of feedback.

To combat this problem, I was thinking that an ideal way to open a bootcamp
would be to give a brief demonstration of the final product. In other words,
the instructor would come in with a pre-prepared, gold-standard Python
script. They would demonstrate the utility of this script by first using the
-h option at the command line (which would print instructions about the
required command line arguments and options to the screen). They could then
execute the script using some example input data, just to show that it
works. They would then proceed to make a simple change to the script, and
then demonstrate that it still passes its unit tests (i.e. using some
pre-prepared tests). Finally, they would commit the changed script to
version control and view the changes via an external hosting service like
GitHub.

This kind of motivating demonstration to keep folks motivated during
the initial phases of learning is something that I use frequently in
my university courses. I've received lots of positive feedback in this
context. However in that case I'm typically showing them where they
are going to get over the next week or month and so I'm not clear how
well this would translate to bootcamps.

Ethan