Ideas to make workshops interesting

<p>I conducted a photography workshop for beginners last week. It's a 4 week (once a week) workshop where I'm covering the basics of photography (exposure, composition, lighting, sharpness, etc). Last week I gave them an overview and covered some very basic composition stuff (like not cutting people's limbs off, rule of thirds, giving space, keeping it simple, etc). I noticed that some of the younger students (teenagers) started to get bored a little and wanted to do some activity. So I made them take a few pictures around the venue for 15 mins, and we did a critique session after.<br>

Next week, I plan to cover the basics of exposure (exposure triangle, depth of field, aperture/shutter etc), and since this session can get a little on the theory side, I'm afraid that the younger ones might lose concentration soon. So, I'm wondering what activity (that will help them understand exposure better) I could have them do to keep them engaged and interested?<br>

Thanks!</p>

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<p>From teaching in another field (linguistics, speech technology) I can tell you that students respond better to interacting than to lecturing, and even better to activity, doing things that help them understand. As one example, when you deal with aperture and f/stops, let them figure out, maybe by examining circles (on paper, that they handle themselves) of different sizes, how the difference between f/4 and f/2.8 represents a doubling of the area that admits light. Make them figure it out if they can. Then the idea that you can double the area or increase the exposure time should become clear. If you have a film camera that you can afford to let them handle, they can see the diaphragm working to produce different apertures.</p>

<p>Be prepared to have students work things out in different ways. I once had a class of a dozen students who had to write short computer programs to do some speech analysis tasks. None were trained programmers, and they pretty much took a dozen different approaches.</p>