Class labs are more effective if they use a scenario that builds up to a sample solution. Attendees leave the class feeling they have built something and have a toolkit useful for their environment. The difficulty comes with selecting the scenario. It has to be complex enough to support labs on advanced topics but simple enough to be readily understood.
I once taught a class on database usage that had a rental car agency as the sample application. It was so complicated that some users complained that they did not attend the class to learn the rental-car business. Others who knew the rental-car business complained the business rules in the sample were wrong. These discussions took away from class time and enjoyment. We ended up selecting another scenario when the class was revised.
My most recent lab creation involved a simple case of “login failure” from linux_secure logs. They were easy to discover and examine. The labs were designed to investigate the situation by looking at other data sources and correlating them to the log records. The use of statistical operators and data visualization in the product were used to discover how often these failures occurred, which accounts were most frequently involved, which geo locations originated the login request and other clues. I’m not a security expert and knew that this was not a very sophisticated example of systems under attack. But it was simple enough for all attendees to immediately grasp and the experts in the class were kind enough to go along with such an elementary use case. (it was, after all, the first class in the curriculum so it was elementary). I am pleased to say that this scenario was used successfully for years.
Recently I notice the class labs were changed to use an e-commerce example. I believe this was done to align the class labs to the documentation examples. Whether this is a good thing or not has been the subject of debate in my latest consulting engagement. This will be a topic for a future blog post.