How to Run Recaps

Like all of the other posts on this blog, you will find that the Player Ambassadors and Coach Ambassadors all have varying opinions about how to do things. Running recaps is no exception.

I like following a hybrid approach to what a few others have suggested. It’s important to start by ensuring that the students are aware of the rules. This is especially true with the new School Sanction Policy that has been implemented.

The way that I’ve found most effective for the group that I am involved with has been a combination of leveraging the Gym using Discord on weekends to run walk-throughs of the different categories and answering any questions that may be lingering and causing any confusion. Reiterate the importance of taking notes, encourage writing personal walk-throughs (with the caveat that they cannot be published), discuss various tools, and emphasize keeping track of the resources that are collected for when the active Games begin and questions can no longer be asked. This will all make it less confusing when recap time arrives, as students will have documented the methods they’ve tried and whether they worked or not.

The cyber league that I am a part of has former members who have graduated and moved on into their careers, but they will jump in, time permitting, to give their perspectives, to demonstrate the available public challenges, or even to create their own in order to reinforce concepts. If we see that only one person did well in reverse engineering, we’ll discuss what might have been tried and ask the person who solved it to explain their methodology to the group.

By using Discord, or any communication tool that you’re comfortable with, screen sharing can allow us to not only present to other students but allow them to present as well. All of this works great before the active Games begin with the Preseason, but what about during active play? This gets a bit tricky, but you can still run recap sessions for categories that are not in active play, and that is what we like to do.

The way that we’ve found most effective thus far is to focus on seeing how everyone did and which challenges caused the most strife. After gaining insight into problem areas, we encourage those who found solutions to share how they went about solving those challenges. It’s important to get multiple perspectives when they are available.

For another great view on how to run your recaps, go check out JeanaByte‘s posts here:

~ See you in the games and forever stalking the slack – Hush1e ~