I've had a recent similar concern regarding the shell lessons. I think the root cause of this may be the final assignment for instructor training, it's probably easiest for people to just add material. We may need to re-spin that assignment a bit so we don't encourage bloat.
-- Gabriel A. Devenyi B.Eng. Ph.D. Research Computing Associate Computational Brain Anatomy Laboratory Cerebral Imaging Center Douglas Mental Health University Institute McGill University t: 514.761.6131x4781 e: [email protected] On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 11:32 AM, Ivan Gonzalez <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > I'm going through the Python novice lesson for a workshop I'm teaching > this week. It's been a few months since the last time I taught it and I've > noticed that the lesson has increased substantially. I feel the same with > the git novice lesson: in the last couple of months I'm the maintainer, > we've added a good 15 minutes in a lesson that most instructors and > learners have trouble finishing. Also, I think these additions are not > reflected properly in the estimated times. > > For example, the first topic of the python lesson [1] has now 10 > challenges, plus variables, memory model, operators, importing a module, > numpy arrays, slicing and indexing, methods for objects, plotting with > matplotlib, and some strings. The estimated time is 30 minutes, which > leaves me with ~2 mins per concept and 1 minute per challenge, where I'm > supposed to correctly type and run more than 50 lines of code. I also have > to show how iPython notebook works. I think this is not doable for the > average novice learner and instructor. > > As I said, this is not specific to the Python lesson. In a workshop I > taught last week, a similar situation with other lessons created a lot of > frustration among the students and, specially, among the instructors and > helpers (all first-timers but me). > > I understand that we all want to contribute to the lessons and add the > last best thing, but we are risking that our lessons become more a > self-study material, instead of something instructors can use in a workshop. > > Best, > > Ivan > > [1] http://swcarpentry.github.io/python-novice-inflammation/01-numpy.html > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > > http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org >
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