4:59 PM, Friday February 19th 2021
So the trick to Drawabox is ultimately its structure. Every student goes down the same path, completing the same exercises, and generally speaking their mistakes all come from the same limited set. As we get deeper into the lessons (Lesson 3 and onward), the work gets somewhat more varied, but even here the mistakes can be grouped together.
The big benefit here is that it makes Lessons 1 and 2, as well as the box challenge, the sort of thing we can turn into a checklist. For now, Elodin (the one who's basically taken informal ownership of encouraging people to do community critiques, specifically through his critique-exchange program on discord) has some informal checklists that you can go through when critiquing any one of these:
Following a checklist saves you from having nothing to say - when going over an exercise, or over a section, you can comment briefly on either the fact that they did something correctly, or that they did that thing wrong. This saves us from the general but unhelpful "nice work!"
I'm actually working my way through revising all of the course material, starting from Lesson 1 and working my way up to rerecord videos and adjust the text where necessary. As I get to the end of a given lesson, I'm going to create a more official checklist that students will be able to use. For now though, lots of people are making good use of Elodin's work there.
At the end of the day, it's normal to be afraid that you might cause some kind of negative impact on a student - it shows that you actually care about how they turn out. Often there have been people (one I had to ban from our discord chat server recently) who just offer advice blindly, without actually taking any amount of responsibility for where that individual is being steered. Being generally aware of the impact of the advice we offer is important.
That said, following along with a checklist, in a structured environment like this, relieves a lot of that additional pressure. Instead of coming in with big recommendations without basis (akin to taking someone by the hand and leading them on an adventure through the whole world), all you're doing is helping someone cross the street at a defined crosswalk. There's not nearly as much room for misleading people, by design.
