For the purpose of this workshop we decided to write our own tutorial which you can find here: tutorial.djangogirls.org.
We're biased :), but we really recommend using this for the workshop. It has been tested and corrected by a lot of people and you can fit it into an 8 hour workshop.
In the tutorial everyone builds their own blog. Of course, changes from that are really appreciated as it helps women to understand even more what's happening under the hood.
The idea behind the tutorial is that you're learning by making lots of mistakes and then fixing them. Like in real life, right?
We do this to get people familiar with errors and bugs which happen to every programmer all the time. We want people not to be afraid of them, but learn how to read, understand and fix them. Don't skip this part, it's important!
This technique also allows people to better understand how it actually works. If you just copy and paste the code, you can't learn how it works. If you really need to think about it - this is when it starts to click.
The goal of the tutorial is to build a working web application and deploy it to the internet.
But the goal is not to turn people into programmers in one day - this is not possible. We want to show the sparks, get people excited and show them how much fun it is to build something.
__Getting people excited and making them fall in love with building things is our mission. __
Constantly show them the bigger picture, talk about open source communities, bring in the larger context of the internet.
Yes, but make sure you've tested it before on someone.
Go to our Github repository, fork it and send us a pull request. All kinds of help are really appreciated.