The project

We all know that Excel is one of the most required tools in today’s working environment and at university, so why not get a basic knowledge of this software?

This was the incipit of the course description of my "Excel for beginners course" which I taught at Università della Svizzera Italiana as part of the Digicamp initiative.

The Digicamp was born in 2021 from the idea of Prof Peter Grüber with the aim to encourage students to share their know-how on technical skills they acquired outside of the academic environment, putting them in the role of teachers.

When I heard about the initiative, I started thinking on how I could become a student-teacher and be useful to this project. Talking with my peers I saw the urge of creating an Excel for beginners course for the following reasons:

• Firstly, many students don't have the adequate skills to perform some simple tasks in Excel which are required during some courses

• Secondly, nowadays almost every internship or job description highlights the importance of knowing the infamous "Microsoft office" package and especially Excel

In addition, I really wanted to test myself in an unexplored role such as the one of teaching. During the past years I have gathered some experience pitching school projects or even my start-up idea (but that is for another time), but I never had the opportunity of standing in front of a class alone and teach something.

All in all, this was for me a very formative and exciting experience from which I learned some invaluable lesson even if I was the one who had to make others learn.

In the following posts I will upload the four lessons of my course as well as the exercises and solutions which I created.

Here is the link to Lesson 1 - Introduction to Excel: https://hashnode.com/preview/65f41229f085b49399a4cce4