Great discussion! A few comments from our experience doing copy-paste during our two week sequence analysis workshop for the last 9 years. (Materials here: angus.readthedocs.io/en/2018)
* retention of commands after copy-paste is poor, and people get into the habit of expecting things to work (and you don’t get to see the instructor screw stuff up, either). * copy-paste makes the materials more useful when people revisit the web site later. * for true beginners, copy-paste gets them to the “ok I can see why this is useful” stage faster and is thus more motivating (in my opinion). So, we have chosen to move to a two-tier model, where we first introduce topics through copy-paste. Then, after a few days, we start introducing challenges where they are asked to e.g. execute the same pipeline on novel data, or adjust plots, or whatever - basically, edit the commands appropriately. Since I spend a lot of my time copy-pasting from stack overflow, Python documentation, R docs, etc. and then editing, I feel like this last approach approximates the approach to learning that I use on a ~daily basis (and that I see most people in my lab using). best, —titus > On Jul 16, 2018, at 9:30 AM, Hao Ye <[email protected]> wrote: > > And it's definitely the case that copy-and-paste can be faster -- especially > if you don't type so much that you're super fast at it. > > Completely agree! Workshop attendees may be infrequently at a computer > (perhaps they are bench or field scientists), so keeping up with the typing > speed of instructors can be challenging. It's useful to keep this in mind for > coding demos (and to regularly remind folks about tab-autocompletion). > > Best, > -- > Hao Ye > [email protected] > > On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 11:53 AM, Henry Neeman <[email protected]> wrote: > > This is a great question! > > And I've had similar experiences with typing > things in and then retaining them better. > > (For me, it works with people's names, too -- > if I type in your name, I'm vastly more > likely to remember it than if you say it to me.) > > The thing to bear in mind is that we, being > in the business, have vastly more experience > with command line than most of the researchers > we teach and serve. > > So what's obvious to us -- for example, that > many of us retain commands much better if we > type them out -- isn't obvious to them, > because they haven't had enough experience > with memorizing commands to realize that. > > And it's definitely the case that > copy-and-paste can be faster -- especially if > you don't type so much that you're super fast > at it. > > --- > > Henry Neeman ([email protected]) > Assistant Vice President, Information Technology - Research Strategy Advisor > Director, OU Supercomputing Center for Education & Research (OSCER) > Associate Professor, Gallogly College of Engineering > Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Computer Science > The University of Oklahoma > > 3200 Marshall Avenue Suite 130, Norman OK 73019 > 405-325-5386 (office), 405-325-5486 (fax), 405-245-3823 (cell), > [email protected] (to e-mail me a text message) > http://www.oscer.ou.edu/ > > ---------- > > On Mon, 16 Jul 2018, Purwanto, Wirawan wrote: > > >All, > > > >I am new to Carpentry community so please > >bear with me if this is a stupid question, > >or not related to Carpentry. I have been > >facilitating people on my campus to use HPC > >and research computing resources in general. > > > >One thing I see with many folks learning new > >computing stuff is that they are lazy at > >typing even simple commands. Instead, they > >rely on cut and paste operation. I believe > >there is something done on your brain if you > >actually type or write things down, instead > >of merely staring at words and do "passive" > >copy-and-paste operation. I still > >intentionally type commands (even if they > >are somewhat long) just to get it written on > >my brain. Anyone having similar observation? > >If so, how will you encourage them to be > >"active" in typing rather than just do the > >most convenient thing? > > > >Wirawan Purwanto > >Computational Scientist, Research Computing Group > >Information Technology Services > >Old Dominion University > >Norfolk, VA 23529 > > > >The Carpentries / discuss / see discussions + > >participants + delivery options > >Permalink > > The Carpentries / discuss / see discussions + participants + delivery options > Permalink ------------------------------------------ The Carpentries: discuss Permalink: https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/Taf27bc5ac21f2829-M7cefd05986f022a94b55c2e6 Delivery options: https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups
