Giuseppe,
We have lots of workshops (not SWC), but never have workshops without
"shoulder-surfers" who walk around keeping students from falling behind
as much as possible. A single instructor or expert probably won't work.
Sounds like a post-workshop survey (perhaps two... one immediate and
another two weeks later) would be appropriate.
In my first SWC workshop, it appeared I was the only person running
Windows 10 on my laptop, and yes GitHub, and Python were frustrating at
times (although both the instructors and myself learned a lot). Since
then, I was motivated to make this work seamlessly and it took a big
chunk of time, but I found the way. Now, I'm going to write my own
GitHub module for Windows 10 users.
My experiences are that it can be frustrating to fall behind, the
instructor should ALWAYS have helpers (preferably a diverse group), and
the entire ordeal worked out as SWC had planned... we learned enough to
know what we didn't know, and thus were motivated to fix it (for myself,
and others).
As for errors messages, they were treated as opportunities to
trouble-shoot... a lesson in how to read error messages. Not a bad thing
to learn...
There's also plenty of discussion about whether to program code "live"
and make mistakes (as examples of how errors can occur even to experts)
or to use a premade copy of the code and transcribe while teaching. I
doubt it matters but because errors were so rapidly corrected by
experts, the learners didn't have time to actually see how they were
corrected.
peter
On 01/27/2016 6:33 PM, Giuseppe Profiti wrote:
Dear all,
during a recent training course (not a SWC, but we used many of its
techniques while showing how to use few software for analysis), we had
many trainers and some of them had an approach to exercises that I
found strange. After the course we discussed that, since I was
interested in their point of view.
The lesson was something like that: less than 1 hour of explanation,
then exercises were presented and the students had 1 hour or a bit
more to complete them. Using colored stickers, students could attract
our attention when they needed help.
I was a bit skeptic about this approach: the students had no clue
about the content and the format of the input file provided, some of
the steps required knowledge about a couple of bugs in the software
UI, and there was no explanation on the expected output (or on the
meaning of the output, when there was more than one result). Also,
given the length of the session there was no way to adjust their pace:
few finished almost all the exercises, some were stuck at the first
one and so on.
However, another trainer pointed out that in this way the students
were forced to think about the problems they were facing and to ask
for help.
In my opinion, while error messages or wrong results are good for
learning (i.e. by showing an error message it is possible to explain
the importance of reading them to understand the problem, while
running a software with wrong settings is useful to introduce new
parameters and options), I found that frustration may be the most
probable outcome.
Also, explaining the correct usage of a (bugged) software to each
single person that asks for help may be a waste of time.
Since the strategy of splitting the presentation in short chunks,
exercise often nad build from previous results is something I fell
more familiar, I would like to know your opinions about that.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Best,
Giuseppe
--
Adjunct professor - International Master's degree in Bioinformatics
Post-doctoral Research Fellow - Biocomputing Group
University of Bologna, Italy
_______________________________________________
Discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
_______________________________________________
Discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
