Hi John,
Thank you for the summary - this is really useful feedback. And thanks
to everyone else who's been sending feedback to me and Daniel Chen -
we're talking tomorrow, and I hope we can post a summary of what we're
all doing and how it's working early next week.
Glad it went well,
Cheers,
Greg
On 2014-09-23 9:31 AM, John Blischak wrote:
Hi all,
Recently there has been a lot of interest in sharing our experiences
of teaching at bootcamps, e.g.
http://software-carpentry.org/blog/2014/09/building-better-teachers.html
https://github.com/swcarpentry/bc/issues/713
https://github.com/swcarpentry/bc/issues/689
http://lists.software-carpentry.org/pipermail/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org/2014-August/002064.html
http://lists.software-carpentry.org/pipermail/r-discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org/2014-August/thread.html#119
http://lists.software-carpentry.org/pipermail/r-discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org/2014-May/000093.html
Thus I'd like to share some of the practical details of the recent R
bootcamp at the University of Chicago that I taught with Will Trimble,
Emily Davenport, and Dan Braithwaite. The audience consisted of
biologists with little to no prior programming experience. We had ~40
students on the first morning and in the low 30s by the end of the
second afternoon.
https://jdblischak.github.io/2014-09-18-chicago/
## Material covered and time estimates
We had the students arrive at 8:30 so we could start troubleshooting
installations problems as early as possible. At 8:45 I gave a quick
introduction that I modeled after Damien Irving's recent introduction,
followed by the instructors and helpers introducing themselves.
https://jdblischak.github.io/2014-09-18-chicago/slides/intro.pdf
https://twitter.com/DrClimate/status/503734594059763712
Will started teaching the shell promptly at 9. He thoroughly covered
lessons 1-4 at a slow pace, allowing ~15-20 minutes for the exercise
breaks at the end of each lesson. Lessons 5-6 had to be rushed due to
lack of time. While the full lessons 5-6 were not delivered and there
was not time for exercises, he was able to demonstrate for loops, a
shell script that took standard input, and a shell script that took a
filename as a command-line argument. We stopped for lunch at noon, so
with a coffee break of ~15 minutes this took 2 hours and 45 minutes.
Emily taught Git lessons 1-4 at a slow, thorough pace. This took about
2 hours and 15 minutes.
Since we had time at the end of the day, Will taught shell lesson 7.
This took an hour, though he had to go through the exercises with the
students together since there was not enough time left for them to
work on them on their own.
On the second day, Dan started with the novice R lessons (which are
based off of the novice Python lessons). These took a long time,
especially lesson 2 on functions. Lessons 1-3 took about 4 hours and
30 minutes.
In the last 90 minutes, I was able to cover lesson 4 and then the
first third of the lesson on writing command-line programs (the
exercises in this lesson are quite involved). We stopped after doing
the first exercise to write a program to do arithmetic. I purposely
skipped lesson 5, defensive programming, in the Python lessons, since
it does not use the inflammation data as an example.
## Delivery of materials
While we did not make heavy use of the online lessons during our
presentations, we provided these to the learners throughout the
bootcamp. This served two main purposes. First, it provided some
structure to the day, i.e. the students could follow the progression
as we moved from one lesson to the next. Second, it was a way to
deliver the exercises to the students. Many of the exercises include
pictures and/or example input/output, so we preferred this approach
over writing the questions into the Etherpad.
For the Shell, we used the tarball approach in the current PR from
Clare Slogget. For most users, this downloaded into their Downloads
folder, which they were able to navigate to using cd.
https://github.com/swcarpentry/bc/pull/716
For the novice R lessons, I created a small repo with the necessary
data files and also an RStudio project file so that it was easy to get
everyone quickly and easily into the correct working directory.
https://github.com/jdblischak/swc-novice-r
## Summary
Overall, I think this was the most successful bootcamp that I have
participated in. I suspect this is due to the following reasons:
1. The novice materials introduce fewer commands but then show more
advanced concepts using this smaller toolset (i.e. in past bootcamps I
had never got to pipes in the shell or command-line programs in
Python/R).
2. The amazing SWC windows-installer makes Git Bash actually usable.
There is no way the Windows students would have been able to follow
along with these lessons without nano and Rscript.
3. More and more biologists are exposed to programming, so it is
easier for them to see the usefulness of what we are teaching.
John
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Greg Wilson
Software Carpentry | http://www.software-carpentry.org/
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