Hi Nelle: We told them at the beginning to start thinking about a project that might be relevant to their work, and that would benefit from automation. Then after a week of the class, when they had passing familiarity with the tool set, we had them discuss in class what they were thinking of trying. It ranged from using curl to scrape images from a museum web page for the plants they studied, to a teaching tool for simulating DNA replication and transcription, importing and plotting data in R. There were a lot of variations on “search for a motif in a set of DNA sequences”, etc.
They worked on these projects mainly after class ended in the evenings, and yes there was a lot of consultation with instructors and other students. We had them each create a git repo on bitbucket so we could review their code and create issues or make comments. (There are better ways to manage this that have since become available/come to our attention. [1]) On the last day they each gave a presentation / demo of the state of their project, whether totally finished or not, and it was amazing! One professor who had not programmed before created a script to find the characteristic four-peptide motif (something like S[TL]V[RL]) that she and her collaborators had been trying to find in a big genetic dataset. During the class we spent a lot of time coming up with canned exercises and debugging tests to drive home certain points, but they were really motivated by this chance to make something personally useful right away. Again, this worked because we had them for 12 days, and would be harder to achieve in two or three days... -Steve [1] https://github.com/blog/2055-teachers-manage-your-courses-with-classroom-for-github > On Oct 27, 2015, at 11:59 , Nelle Varoquaux <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi, > > Can you say a bit more about the way you dealt with the personal project? > I don't see how it could scale very well, if students work on their > own project, so I'm curious to understand more how you organized it, > and how much support the instructor gave the students. > > Thanks, > N _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
