Tutorial Design Ideas

[slabasan]

Overall Goal: Introduce structure of shorter lessons alternating with hands-on exercises

Core Concept: "Story" Units

• Build the tutorial out of small, self-contained "stories", each pairing a short slide segment (concept, why it matters, what it enables) with a hands-on exercise that puts it into practice
• Create far more stories than any single half-day tutorial needs, forming a reusable content library rather than a fixed curriculum

Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Delivery

• The tutorial starts with intros, a high-level overview of the tools, and a super basic intro. Then poll attendees (Slido) to learn which topics they most want to learn
• Use poll results to select which stories to actually teach, so the session adapts to attendee interest instead of hoping a fixed agenda matches their needs
• We wouldn't necessarily get to teach everyone exactly what they want, but this way the tutorials can change to fit what the people want instead of us having to hope our content covers what they want.

Skill Tree / Map Structure

• Reframe stories as nodes in a "skill tree" (like a video game): white boxes = mini-tutorials/stories, colored boxes at the bottom = high-level end-goal tasks, colored arrows = the path through mini-tutorials needed to reach each goal (see figure)
• Example goals: "add your own benchmark" vs. "run existing benchmarks on your system". Both might share early steps ("Intro to the tools" → "Intro to workspaces") but diverge later ("Writing an application" vs. "writing a system")
• Build similar maps for other skill sets beyond benchmarking, e.g., profiling applications
• Poll attendees using the end-goal boxes, then pick whichever paths cover the maximum number of desired skills across the group

Documentation & Online Access

• Publish the stories online as cached mini-presentations so people can access them asynchronously/offline
• Document the skill tree online so people can map their own end goal to the sequence of tutorials/stories needed to get there
• Tie this into existing docs structure — e.g., on the Benchpark docs "Using Benchpark" page, distinguish mini-story content ("Set up a workspace") from end-goal content ("Analyze a scaling study")

@pearce8 @douglasjacobsen