That looks like a great event. Congrats on your success. How many people came to the workshop, and were they mostly faculty, undergrads, grad students?
Sam On Sat, Mar 17, 2018 at 9:43 PM, Christopher Lemmer Webber <[email protected]> wrote: > 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. -- 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.
