A Task

Tutorial format for teaching how to perform a specific task

Overview

The Task format is a tutorial where you want to teach people how to do something specific. This is likely a task they may have to do themselves. For example:

• Make a specific type of data visualization

• Run and check the output of a statistical or predictive model

• Do some type of processing to a data file or data files

• Scrape data from a website and put it into a usable format

At the end of the tutorial, they will have accomplished the task. There may be a lot of contextual information and knowledge that goes into the task, but you're just focusing on accomplishing this specific task.

For example, if you're making a data visualization, you will focus on the functions and options to make the visualization and not teach additional functions or options not needed for the task. Or if you're web scraping, you will focus on the specific case you're having them complete, not teaching them everything about CSS -- just what they need to know.

What are your 3-6 sections?

Here, your 3-6 sections are the steps to doing the task.

Write out the steps involved in doing the task. Each step should be roughly a line of code or a coherent expression. Maybe a little more if this is a more advanced tutorial.

If you have more than 3-6 tasks, are there ones that can be easily combined? If not, is this a task that can be taught in an hour? If not, is there a simpler version or smaller task?

Writing the Exercise Outline

For this type of tutorial, your exercises will very closely mirror your teaching materials -- you will demonstrate a step, and then your learners will do that step, except with a different dataset/file/variable/object. This means that defining the steps of the Task you are teaching is the key to outlining your exercises. Outline the steps to do the Task, then each step will become an exercise.

Since you want your learners to complete the task you're showing them how to do, there isn't as much opportunity to get creative with different exercise types as there is with some other tutorial types. Consider adding some variation by adding "challenge" sections to your exercises that encourage learners to explore other alternatives or options.

Or switch up the format of a section and start with an exercise instead of teaching materials: ask learners to read the documentation to figure out how to do a step (instead of you explicitly teaching it first) or search the internet for an answer. Then spend more time than usual going over the answer and any variations on the answer you might want to cover or explain.

Overall, the key to your exercise outline is knowing what the steps are to complete your task. Each step becomes an exercise.

Example

Create a beautiful dot plot in matplotlib

Exercise Outline

• Formatting the data

• Coding the plot

• Changing the appearance of the dots

• Changing the appearance of the axes

• Turning the plot vertical

• Bonus: Automating the figure size