Getting non-programmers interested in programming

...in just one hour

[Habtom]

We regularly conduct seminars related to the financial markets, and we have recently added up a seminar on MQL programming ... and the goal is to share a bit of knowledge with attendees and get them interested in our full courses.

MQL is a MetaTrader programming language, not very different than C or PHP structurally.

The challenge: Describing a programming language to a bunch of strangers what they can achieve by doing that.

I'm beat by the kind of questions I get 45 minutes into the seminar . . .

Did you have to do that? How would you conduct the seminar?

[rocknbil]

When asked what I do, I don't even try to explain. I point out the results, "See that? It's not a web page. It's a complex set of programming that outputs it based on your input." That's as far as I dare go.

Along those lines, people are a selfish lot; find **one thing** that will be important to them. A single thing that will make it worth their effort to lay down the texting for a moment and pay attention. Then walk through the simplest possible implementation, step by step. The result you want is "WOW, that was easy, tell me more."

[Habtom]

Thanks rocknbil.

By learning the programming language traders can very well guard their financial trading strategies since it is not being exposed to some other developer. Many are interested, but they kind of get shocked once they see the kind of effort involved in developing one.

For that reason we conduct free seminars every month to get people sit for our paid programming courses.

I will start by showing them one thing they could be really interested in without getting into much of technical jargons, as you suggested rocknbil.