Carpentries Instructors’ meeting
- Monday, January 8, 2024
- 9:00-10:00 AM
Present:
Albin, Brooks-Kieffer, Brownrabbit, Hanson, Kisielinski, Knight, Sanderson, Swift, Trana
Announcements
None
Agenda
- 2024 workshops
- Final prep for Data Carpentry Genomics
- Updates about other projects
- Q&A and support for instructor training and checkout tasks
Discussions
2024 Workshops
The AIMS sponsored project is planning a workshop series for February. Potential topics include:
- R Ecology (Data Carpentry Data Analysis & Visualization in R)
- Reproducible Research with R (Incubator)
- Geospatial + R (Data Carpentry)
- Git (Software Carpentry)
Others are interested in SQL. Spring 2024 seems too soon to work on HPC Carpentry.
Data Carpentry Genomics Workshop
Weather was the main topic of conversation, especially since registrants include some non-local learners. Tentative plans to take the first workshop day to Zoom for safety.
Potential trouble spots in the lessons:
- Moving files from the AMI to the learner’s local computer with
scp
- Learner’s desktops on OneDrive (Windows users)
- Data wrangling and processing section on QA with
fastqc (Day 2); recommendation for helpers to go through that section
- Downloading IGV locally - would likely save this for the end of a day as a supplemental section
- Suggestion for learners to open a shell or terminal right away for troubleshooting
- primary concern is Windows cmd syntax vs Unix-style syntax on Linux and Mac machines
- becomes less of an issue once everyone is logged in to their AMI
Other Projects
Paul posted a link for folks to volunteer to be a data science expert for high school students in the KC area.
Joel ran a pilot of his small R workshop based on R Ecology with 6 participants. Wasn’t able to finish the lesson (no surprise) and is still looking for areas to trim. Got a lot of feedback about the whole lesson; dplyr seemed too abstract for the time available.
Instructor Training and Checkout Tasks
Two attendees are registered for training in early February.
Advice on teaching demo checkout task:
- Don’t be nervous (although it’s normal to be); it will be fine
- Don’t rush through the content and the five minutes will fly by
- Look at the lessons they suggest and be comfortable with those; this is the best preparation
Notes by JBK, posted by JBK