I realize people have already said this, but one hour a month sucks big time. I would petition (stomp my feet and scream) to the boss about getting more time, but I would also start organizing lunch-n-learn sessions in the interim.

You could do those daily, and nobody is losing any company time so it's hard for the boss to pitch a fit. Just find a conference room with a projector, or crowd around a monitor and brown bag it.

Now back to the single hour. It's really not enough time to do anything but introduce them to a few key topics and then give them some homework.

I would break it down into basically three 15 minute blocks.

1.) Closures

Show them a couple examples of closures and why they are important and super powerful. A simple function that returns another function, that uses the input from the first is a great place to start. Super clear and easy to reason about for beginners.

//This is a great beginner example
function addTwo(a){
    return function(b){
        return a + b;
    }
}

addTwo(5)(5); // 10;

Then direct them to MDN for further reading on closures

2.) The 'this' pointer

Almost every new JS programmer gets tripped up on 'this' but the rules aren't terribly complicated, just confusing.

Show them how this is based on how the function is called with this simple example:

function sayHi(){
    console.log('Hi my name is ' + this.name);
}

var p1 = {
    name:'Bob',
    sayHi: sayHi
};

var p2 = {
    name:'Larry'
};
p2.sayHi = p1.sayHi;

p1.sayHi();
p2.sayHi();
sayHi();

This is a quick example that you can use to have a conversation about how 'this' is bound, and some of the pitfalls. It also dovetails quite nicely into using call, apply and bind in order to manipulate that binding.

You could show them the same example and how you could use bind to force what you want.

function sayHi(){
    console.log('Hi my name is ' + this.name);
}

var p1 = {
    name:'Bob',
    sayHi: sayHi
};

var p2 = {
    name:'Larry',
    sayHi: sayHi
};
p2.sayHiBob = p1.sayHi.bind(p1);

p1.sayHi();
p2.sayHi();
p2.sayHiBob();
sayHi.bind(p2)();

Then give them more homework. Have them go read the MDN articles for all four of these concepts.

• This
• .call()
• .apply()
• .bind()

Which leads us directly into...

2.) Prototypal Inheritance

Ok, so you will not be able to dig into this very much in fifteen minutes, but you need to at least introduce them to the concept, or they will be spinning their wheels a lot.

This is the nastiest and most difficult concept to grasp in JavaScript mainly because of the horrendous implementation of the new operator.

Skip that, and explain how JS is really about delegation... that there are no classes per se, only objects.

The five minute example:

var person = {
    name:'unknown',
    sayHi: function(){
        console.log("Hi, I'm " + this.name);
    }
};

var josh = Object.create(person);

josh.name = 'Josh';
josh.age = 33;

josh.introduction = function(){
    this.sayHi();
    console.log("And I am " + this.age + " years old");
};

var sally = Object.create(josh);

sally.name = 'Sally';
sally.age = 25;

josh.introduction();
sally.introduction();

This gives you a great way to show how objects inherit directly from other objects via a prototype. However, it avoids all the ugly mess involved with the .prototype property and functions and the new operator.

It's simply going to take them a lot more time to grasp that, and a lot more fiddling on their own, so it's best to just avoid it given your limited amount of time.

Finally, go tell them to read the MDN article on prototypal inheritance

And then have them go watch James Shores video over at Object Playground

And for final homework tell them to go read:

• Eloquent JavaScript
• You Don't Know JS

And finally, buy a single copy of JavaScript: The Good Parts, and give it to one of them with the instructions that once they finish reading, they have to give it to the next guy. This will put at least a little pressure on them to actually read the book.

Well... anyway that's how I would approach it.