Hi Robert, You should get in touch with Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel about this:
https://stat.duke.edu/~mc301/ She's using R Markdown, for example, in undergraduate courses. One observation: In many institutions, undergraduate teaching falls disproportionately on faculty, sessionals, adjuncts with high teaching loads. Over the years, that limits the time and mental energy the instructor for research and other non-teaching projects. This cuts off prime opportunities to develop and use software carpentry skills. This is especially true for the folks teaching undergraduate science labs, i.e. they aren't necessarily data/cs/stats people by training. So, I think it's no coincidence that you see more of this at the grad level. You're right, a lot of it *could* show up much earlier. But, speaking for myself, I have the luxury of time and energy for this and generally get deployed on graduate courses. It would be great to figure out how to help this stuff trickle down more! -- Jenny On 2015-04-21, at 10:43 AM, "Robert M. Flight" <[email protected]> wrote: > Does anyone know of any examples where software carpentry type skills have > been integrated into an undergraduate science curriculum? It seems to me that > the various skills taught in software carpentry could be integrated into an > undergraduate science curriculum if done correctly, given the prevalence of > data manipulations that are frequently performed in undergraduate science > labs (chemistry titrations / conversions, physics equation fitting, biology > number manipulations), at least in my experience over 10 years ago. I don't > imagine that things have changed, and have likely gotten worse. > > I know that Jenny Bryan is integrating a lot of this stuff into her advanced > stats class (which is awesome), but the more I think about it, it seems that > it would be useful to introduce things earlier rather than later. > > I would be very appreciative if anyone has any specific examples from their > own or others teaching. > > Regards, > > -Robert > > Robert M Flight, PhD > Bioinformatics Research Associate > Resource Center for Stable Isotope Resolved Metabolomics > Markey Cancer Center > University of Kentucky > Lexington, KY > > Twitter: @rmflight > Web: rmflight.github.io > EM [email protected] > PH 502-509-1827 > > The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new > discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny ..." - Isaac > Asimov > Jennifer Bryan Associate Professor Department of Statistics and the Michael Smith Laboratories University of British Columbia Vancouver, BC Canada _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
