I liked the presentations. The pre-presentation package for the Fermi estimates thing was great, and the lightning talks round was a great concept to get some really distilled presentations in.
Random practical notes for the Fermi estimates lecture: If you want people to do an estimate with a hard time limit, don’t have the questions pre-printed on the work sheets you pass around, that will lead to people pretty much automatically cheating and reading ahead on the questions. Just pass around empty paper and pens and show the words in slides. When showing the correct answer slide, also show the explicit range of values that are accepted as the right answer to make it trivial for the audience to see if they got a good enough answer.
With the exercises on the mnemonics lecture, it turned out to be pretty obvious that speaking single English words out of context to an audience of non-English speakers and expecting them to get the words right doesn’t work all that well. Have the words written on slides instead.
Socializing-wise, I ran out of let’s-play-nice-with-other-people mental energy about three hours in as I usually do on meetups, which was sort of unfortunate on a 40-hour meetup.
I liked the presentations. The pre-presentation package for the Fermi estimates thing was great, and the lightning talks round was a great concept to get some really distilled presentations in.
Random practical notes for the Fermi estimates lecture: If you want people to do an estimate with a hard time limit, don’t have the questions pre-printed on the work sheets you pass around, that will lead to people pretty much automatically cheating and reading ahead on the questions. Just pass around empty paper and pens and show the words in slides. When showing the correct answer slide, also show the explicit range of values that are accepted as the right answer to make it trivial for the audience to see if they got a good enough answer.
With the exercises on the mnemonics lecture, it turned out to be pretty obvious that speaking single English words out of context to an audience of non-English speakers and expecting them to get the words right doesn’t work all that well. Have the words written on slides instead.
Socializing-wise, I ran out of let’s-play-nice-with-other-people mental energy about three hours in as I usually do on meetups, which was sort of unfortunate on a 40-hour meetup.
Giving everybody nametags was good.