How to Estimate Times for Projects in a Programming Workshop? I am going to be teaching a workshop on Julia for data science and scientific computing soon. I came up with a plan that has a lot more than we will be able to do (just in case), but was wondering about how to come up with a good estimate for how far along we will get. I find this hard to estimate since for most of the assignments I could do them really quickly, but that's because I am experience in the language and the biggest hurdle will be learning the documentation, syntax, and all the special issues of a new language.

That said, do you have any good heuristics for how long projects will take in a workshop? It's hard to know the exact number of students right now, but I think it will be anywhere from 10~30, and I'd assume more students would make it go slower. I thought of doing something like "this takes me 5 minutes, so plan 20 minutes", but the number 20 has no basis in reality because I have never done this.
Test drive

Grab a couple of local students of comparable level and have them do the assignments.

Your own speed is not indicative - something that takes you five minutes may take ten minutes or may be incomplete after an hour; only practical experience can show how it will turn out.

In addition, usually setting up a working development environment can be a major time sink - if people use their own hardware and various operating systems, then some of them can waste a lot of time until they are able to run a 'hello world' program; you should have a clear plan on how you will handle it.