Django Girls Jos #2
This blog post was written by Katherine Amao. Thank you, Katherine :)
Django Girls Jos #2 was an awesome workshop. In our first event in June, we trained 33 participants with 44 registered applicants. We had to reject the rest because we were not prepared for them. Also, we could not finish the tutorial in two days.
This inspired us to increase the number of attendees anticipated, increase the days of the workshop to three days and prepare better this time. We had a little above two months to organize the event. Once the site was up, we applied to PSF for support in organizing the event. We applied to train 50 participants but didn’t get the full support we need. It left me wondering how to bring to pass “A THREE DAYS DJANGO GIRLS WORKSHOP (instead of the usual two days)” for 50 attendees in a city where getting support was almost impossible.
Well, I was not going to let anything stand in the way of this workshop, so my team and I got to work. We applied to the Plateau State Government for a free hall. We were promised former Tax Academy Hall but got permission to use it just before the workshop. We needed publicity so we approached one of the popular radio stations here, Silverbird radio and our former publicity partner, Jay FM. The announcements started but the responses were not as we expected or needed. We also printed posters and visited four secondary schools and told them about the workshop, they were excited and quickly registered their students.
In total, we had 60 applicants and 50 attendees. We were wowed by the attendance and participation. The workshop began each day at 8 am to 2 pm, with a 30-minute break from 11.30 am to 12 pm. The first day was installation and HTML, CSS tutorials. The second day we taught the participants Python, they were ecstatic! The third day, we taught them Django. The participants were always to continue the tutorials each day.
About 40 of the participants were able to build their first blog after the Django tutorial on the third day but could not deploy because of power failure (which occurred close to the end of the final day). Since we could not afford the router needed for proper internet access, students had to use their mobile phones to link to the internet for installations.
We had quite an interesting mix of ladies in attendance. The youngest was 14 years old and the oldest was 42 years old. Among the attendees were students of higher (tertiary) institutions, secondary school students, business owners, and one medical doctor. These were all total beginners. We also had five male participants.
Our coaches did an awesome job. It’s not always easy training total beginners in tech but our coaches made it fun and easy to follow. To show them our appreciation, we hosted them to an early dinner the African way.
I like to say a very big thank you to Python Software Foundation, Github, JayFM, Silverbird, Crescita and Plateau State Government for their awesome support. Above all, I thank God for granting my team and I the strength and wisdom in putting this workshop together.
Django Girls is a non-profit that teaches programming to women all around the world. Want to help us? Support us!