Comparing this (2014-09-18-chicago) workshop to other recent ones I've been on (say, 2014-05-12-cshl), I was amazed; something about the new (v5) lessons (pacing? Choice of things to omit?) seemed to click much better than other, similar workshops.
We got to for/find/grep and standalone scripts with beginners. The single-page THW shell instruction lesson seems more thorough, but never got this far. It seems like more ground is covered at the cost of depth (the instruction on wildcards was weak) but for and grep make it worthwhile. The R translation of the v5 / inflammation materials had a very different flavor than most into R lessons I've seen--heavy on programming syntax and light on data structure and graphing drudgery. I for one am sold on Nelle and her nonexistent goostats. w On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 6:27 PM, Greg Wilson < [email protected]> wrote: > 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 >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Discuss mailing list >> [email protected] >> http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists. >> software-carpentry.org >> > > > -- > Greg Wilson > Software Carpentry | http://www.software-carpentry.org/ > > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists. > software-carpentry.org >
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