Hello everyone! So Morgan and I ran a workshop together (though the workshop was much more so Morgan's work than mine) on teaching Racket/Scribble to non-programmer-academics, particularly in the humanities. I'm happy to say that it was a huge success! All participants said they'd like to have a second session.
Materials from the class are here: https://dustycloud.org/misc/digital-humanities/ Some highlights: - The workshop was split into three parts: install racket, make a snowman in pict, and make a small document in Scribble. We got through all three in 3 hours (though I took too long on the snowman part) and participants are interested in a follow-up session on advanced Scribble features. - Having tangible outputs is key! Pict helps and is nice, but Scribble is even better and more critical, because it's something that humanities folks can leave the event and actually use day to day. - The "Scribble HTML" button in DrRacket made it possible to do this workshop without ever touching the command line. We'd like to do a command line session in a future event but it's great that in this particular session we didn't have to. - 87.5% of the non-volunteer participants were women, despite not mentioning gender specifically on the flier. However we did say "Want to learn computer programming, but don’t think you’re enough of a math / computer science person? Have we got the workshop for you!": https://dustycloud.org/tmp/uwmadison-digital-humanities-flier.pdf This leads me to believe that there is a diverse body of people who would like to program that we generally have not reached because they don't feel like they pattern-match as a stereotypical programmer. Explicitly asking for such people without saying what exact categories those are seemed to have an effect nonetheless. - You may notice that in some ways the Snowman tutorial https://dustycloud.org/misc/digital-humanities/Snowman.html is very similar to the Quick tutorial (which is a stellar tutorial). This is intentional, but there are some differences: the Quick tutorial gives a taste of a lot of features and language aspects, some very advanced. The Snowman tutorial instead introduces fewer features and repeats them a few times. By the end of going through the tutorial most of the participants seemed to get the core ideas that we introduced. Anyway I think they have different goals but the Snowman tutorial can lead to the Quick tutorial, so are complimentary! - Racket's community tends to emphasize "#lang foo" a lot more than I think is healthy. That's to say that actual language differences like Scribble and Typed Racket are fantastic, but something we saw in tests leading up to this workshop was that people would say "I'd like to use this feature but that's only in X language and I'm using Y", when the only difference was actually the default imported libraries. For that reason we deviated from the "Quick" tutorial and used "#lang racket" and imported pict instead. - That said, Morgan and I are talking about writing a "#lang humanities-paper" (or maybe "#lang scribble-humanities"? I dunno) that sets up all the styling defaults for Scribble for most humanities-style papers, so I'm being a complete hypocrite there. - Morgan's "How To Use Scribble to Write your Academic Papers: A Reference Tutorial" https://dustycloud.org/misc/digital-humanities/HowTo.html is mostly built from her own experience trying to convert her dissertation (and other writings) over to Scribble. I think she probably has a lot more interesting things to say about that and her experiences writing that but I shouldn't speak for her. Morgan had the participants go through a modified version of the default Scribble introduction with changes built around what our target audience may use most, and I think that went well. Okay, this email is already pretty long. But anyway, the key thing is that the participants all seemed to *get it*, which I was very excited about, even though many had never programmed before. And 100% of them wanted to do a follow-up workshop or workshops... so, success! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
