I suppose the first question is are you teaching design or are you teaching tech, because there are really two different sides to approaching the MLs. As a technician, this is what I would want to learn/be taught for the first time on an ML:
First off I think one of the most important things to teach is proper handling and setup of the
fixture. MLs are not like your garden
source four that you can kick off the front of the
stage a few times and only end up with a bad
bench focus and bent
shutter. So teach how to get the in and out of the
theatre, and to hang them and be safe with them.
Next up is probably a lesson on
DMX (unless your students have had that). Talk about control channels (or dimmers or outputs [in strand speak]) and how they get softpatched into channels on the board. Talk about how each controllable attribute of the ML need to have one or more control channels. You probably don't need to teach the math that goes into figuring how you beak up 360˚ of movement into 255 data points and such.
Now you are ready to start showing students how to setup and
address the
fixture, connect it to the light board and
power it on. Now, if you are going to be using an arc lamp
fixture you should talk about if the
fixture/lamp supports hot restrikes, how long you need to leave the
power on after you turn the lamp off so that it cools off, and such that hopefully your dealer will tell you when they train you. There are things like the fact that striking the lamp is about equivalent to burning it for an hour so it may not be worth turning the
fixture off when you take your hour dinner break.
Now you should have your
fixture up and the basics in the students heads, so you can move on to showing how to patch fixtures on your
console. Then show them how to control it, and what each attribute does. if you are using a
console that doesn't have attribute encoders then you may want to assign each attribute to a
submaster so it is easy to operate.
Next up show how to record the
fixture into cues. You may also want to talk about how in general in the
theatre world people try to program the
fixture to move while the
intensity is at 0.
Then let your students
play with the controls and get to know the
fixture. If you want to give them a project, maybe get them a piece of music that they have to write a series of ML cues to.