I agree - how's this for a plan?
1. Maintainers for each lesson file an issue suggesting material that
can be moved into discussion.md (a storage depot for extra stuff).
2. We ask trainees to submit exercises (particularly MCQs) rather than
new content.
Ivan/Gabriel, would you be willing to lead discussion of this at
tomorrow's lab meeting?
Thanks,
Greg
On 2015-03-31 11:38 AM, Gabriel A. Devenyi wrote:
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: gdeve...@gmail.com <mailto:gdeve...@gmail.com>
On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 11:32 AM, Ivan Gonzalez <igl...@gmail.com
<mailto:igl...@gmail.com>> 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
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Software Carpentry | http://software-carpentry.org
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