So, in a couple of the workshops that I've taught we have taught that used some changes to the curriculum in order to make the final session reinforce, and tie up loose ends.
With Python/R and SQL, the last bit was showing how to use the SQLite library in either interpreter, so as to turn the results of an SQL query into a data frame for processing into a graph. So we would show a workflow that drew from a SQLite database to create some kind of final plot. I adapted the data carpentry SQL lesson and have used it in both DC and SC workshops to good effect. I haven't written up the R within this lesson, but I found it to be a nice way to tie everything together. https://github.com/fu9ar/sql-pub_health/blob/gh-pages/04-sqlite-and-python.md <https://github.com/fu9ar/sql-pub_health/blob/gh-pages/04-sqlite-and-python.md> <https://github.com/fu9ar/sql-pub_health/blob/gh-pages/04-sqlite-and-python.md>With git being the final thing to teach at Stanford, my co-instructor adapted the git lesson to push a shell script to a github repo rather than text files, to reinforce the shell lesson from the morning before. I usually find that the shell lesson runs long as it is, and at the end, we're having to skip a lot. Maybe I need to pick up the pace at the beginning? --- I think that a lot of people have the most trouble with learning some of the fundamental metaphors that translate between the various parts of the system. File paths seem to be one of the more confusing parts, as well as how the present working directory translates to what happens when doing reads or writes of files in RStudio. Other than that, the most difficult part is making sure that parens and quotes are closed, and some other typos. ________________________________ From: Discuss <[email protected]> on behalf of Christina Koch <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, April 27, 2016 6:52:20 PM To: Software Subject: Re: [Discuss] informal capstones To close the loop, I did two activities as "capstones": - since I didn't get to the command line scripts part of the python lesson (as I'd planned), I did an hour-ish variation from that lesson. (Lengthy) notes are here: * https://github.com/ChristinaLK/swc-lessons/tree/master/script_capstone - another hour-ish activity introducing them to pull requests (sans branching). Upstream repository was: * https://github.com/crazapplejuice/flags I don't like the "toy" aspect of creating flags, but I wanted something that would be fun, relatively easy even for pure novices, and not too taxing at the end of a long two days. Also where everyone could do something different, so the pull requests wouldn't collide. :P A nice variation (I just thought of) might be if you taught a tiny bit of markdown (R folks, esp) in the first half of the afternoon and then had everyone create their own mini report to submit as a PR. Thanks to everyone who responded! I took bits and pieces from several of you. :) Christina On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 8:35 AM, Christina Koch <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Hi all, I'm teaching on the second afternoon of an upcoming (Python) Software Carpentry workshop and am figuring out what to do on the afternoon of the second day. I already have some options, but if anyone on this list has "capstone" or "special topics" materials that they've put together for the final quarter of a workshop, even if it's super unorganized/casual, I'd love to see it, both to get some ideas and hopefully to avoid reinventing the wheel. Thanks, Christina -- Christina Koch - Research Computing Facilitator, University of Wisconsin - Madison, Center for High Throughput Computing Advanced Computing Initiative; Wisconsin Institute for Discovery; ACI-REF [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> // (608) 316 - 4041<tel:%28608%29%20316%20-%204041> // tinyurl.com/ChristinaCalendarCHTC<http://tinyurl.com/ChristinaCalendarCHTC> -- Christina Koch - Research Computing Facilitator, University of Wisconsin - Madison, Center for High Throughput Computing Advanced Computing Initiative; Wisconsin Institute for Discovery; ACI-REF [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> // (608) 316 - 4041 // tinyurl.com/ChristinaCalendarCHTC<http://tinyurl.com/ChristinaCalendarCHTC>
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