Learning to program in Folk is nice and can be made even more fun when you combine paper craft with your programming. This page describes an exercise that Omar and Andrés have used in workshops to teach people how to get started programming in Folk.

• 3 example programs
• slips of paper (2 x n, n = # of participants)
• markers
• Folk keyboards or laptops to connect to Folk via the web server
• a bowl, hat, or other some such “scrambling device” to randomize the slips of paper

1. If you know the participants' names in advance, print Wish $this is labelled "Welcome $name!" pages for each of them
2. Begin the exercise by having participants write down two nouns on their slips of paper, one noun per slip
   • People, when called upon to conjure a specific concept, often have trouble conjuring said thing. If your participants have trouble thinking of nouns for this exercise some nice ones are: bear, boat, apple, pie, and castle.
3. Collect all the slips of paper
4. Place them in a scrambling device (a baseball cap, a bowl, under a cup, etc.) and randomize the slips of paper
5. Have participants pull out two random nouns from your scrambling device
6. Instruct all the participants to take a sheet of paper and draw whatever noun combination they received (e.g. draw a bear-castle or boat-pie OR castle-bear or pie-boat). Drawing takes some time, give participants 5 - 10 minutes for this step.
7. Okay, now we get to the programming! Instruct participants to write the code below, reading each line aloud.

   • # e.g. slip 1 = "bear"
     # e.g. slip 2 = "castle"
     #      Add a label for each slip you got that represents either a sound that noun makes
     #      or a thing you imagine that noun would say
     Wish $this is labelled "roarrrrr" ;# bear sound
     Wish $this is labelled ".... uhhhh ... I'm a castle!" ;# something a castle would say, lol

8. Have participants press Ctrl + S on their editors to see their code take effect.
   • The fun part of this exercise is seeing your code effect other people's programs on the tables (e.g. other bears would get the label “roarrrrr”).
9. Encourage people to doodle their noun combos on their pages
10. Now you can improvise! Outlines, drawings, loading images from the web, go wild :) [TODO: Write a list of places this exercise could go, API's to references, remix, combine]