I participated in one here Boulder, CO as a TA, and yes there were a lot of moving parts, but what I think was important was not deep diving into any particular thing, but getting to the point where they have pushed a "real" app.

I have a few apps of negligible utility that run out on Heroku, and they are no different than the apps Railsbridge participants built.

They got to make something real, and got exposed to real tools and infrastructure.

I share those concerns & agree that MVC is a lot to swallow in an introductory workshop. But it's also very motivating! A lot of people want to build real websites instead of toy programs. We're trying to harness that awesome source of motivation & it seems to be working despite the drawbacks.

Yeah, it's a difficult line to walk between teaching what is comprehensible and enabling people, with magic, to do something concrete, even if they know nothing about how anything works. The former bores people because it's too abstract, and the latter...well, I feel there's the risk that when there's too much magic involved, the students feel as if being a "wizard" is an inherent trait, rather than something you eventually build towards after plugging away at the fundamentals.

I've toyed with teaching a workshop that entails: teach enough programming to turn a non-flat-file dataset (maybe a json of their tweets) into a decent visualization (by plugging into Google Charts, perhaps) and uploading a static page, with Twitter Bootstrap, onto a free hosting service, or even a blog service such as Wordpress.

But even that is a lot to teach in a day:

1. Command line and file system basics 2. Fundamentals of programming (enough to open a JSON file, parse and aggregate it on some conditions, and spit out HTML) 3. Basic HTML and DOM, including what you need to know to 4. Basic webserver/uploading stuff

Most workshops struggle with getting 3 and 4 done. #2 is not easily achievable over even several days.