Suggestions for study groups

Something I have put together for forming a beginners study group, but could be used for others as well. This is from JS101 experience and ideas from books and websites.

• Find people who can meet up regularly, and who are roughly at the same level (even if they might have different interests)
• If meeting in real life, a 2-week interval, for sessions of 2 – 3 hours, seems to work best
• Think about who will do admin and spread roles around the group, eg someone to write up any actions, another to remind about next meeting etc

• Set up a place to collect resources that have proved useful (could be Google Docs, Wiki or Github)
• Create a “curriculum”
• Choose a book or online resource to work through together
• Teach each other things you've learned – give a presentation or write a blog post
• Start a project together
• Stay in touch online – create a chat channel
• Invite experienced people for a talk, or to join as mentors
• Seek help from CodeHub coaches at Hack Nights when needed

• If you plan to work on something together, in my experience it works better to decide from one session to the next (rather than scheduling weeks ahead)
• It could help to have somebody write a little summary of what was discussed each session
• I think the most important thing is that there are some people who are committed. It might help to restrict the whole thing time-wise, e.g. 4 - 6 months

As an example, here is a website we made for our JS101 study group: https://javascript101.co.uk/
Also a React app - that had no designers on board and that we should have documented better - but that we learned a lot from: https://resources.javascript101.co.uk/