Carpentries Instructors’ meeting
- Monday, March 3, 2025
- 9:00-10:00 AM
Present:
Brooks-Kieffer, Busch, Conway, Hanson, Hay, Sanderson
Agenda
- Workshop debrief
- Workshop planning
- Instructor training check in
- Discussion topics
Discussions
Workshop debrief
February 2025: Software Carpentry: R
Overenrolling the workshop resulted in decent attendance - 22 max, 17 who stayed for most of the workshop and seemed excited to learn. Two afternoon schedule seemed to work well. No major issues stalled either afternoon. Even though instructors severely trimmed the content, there was almost too much to do. Exercise at the beginning of day 2 accidentally reviewed most of day 1 content and set a good stage for the rest of the workshop.
Things to consider changing:
- Add datasets to workshop data folder to avoid possible pain points, such as wide-form dataframe and cats data
- Pivot wider/longer on day 2 - going slower would help, since everyone is tired by then. Use
head instead of structure to show differences in a way that’s easier to see on the screen
- A learner mentioned liking PPT visuals to break up looking at code. Add examples in color next time?
- Using Gapminder data without addressing “why” in the data (e.g.: “look at the country with lowest life expectancy”) doesn’t feel great; consider using a different dataset in the future
- In the future, register fewer people and offer spots to waitlisted folks, or overenroll and don’t offer a waitlist.
Workshop planning
Spring 2025: End of semester panic mode is setting in; unlikely to have another workshop before Summer.
Instructor Training check in
Practicing for teaching demo was fun; everyone in the course was very nice. Two teaching demos scheduled for the day after this meeting; advice from the group that 5 minutes goes fast and to not spend a lot of time introducing your teaching section. Serving as an official helper in a Carpentries workshop counts as a checkout task; contact Jamene if you need details about a workshop you helped with.
Discussion topics
Carpentries will start charging for AWS instances for the Genomics workshop; discussed alternatives such as Cyverse, HPC resources at KSU and WSU.
Discussion of how Genomics content might fit into workshop plans for metabarcoding and in-depth genomics content; what are weak spots of the existing lesson? Suggestions included:
- watch for “run this code” instructions without enough information to understand the parameters given
- some of the lesson packages may not be as commonly used now
- be sure to show how to get package manuals
- be sure to show what files actually look like, e.g.: does this VCF look the way it should?
Most of Carpentries Genomics is bash so if learners are already comfortable on the command line, can likely skip most of the early material.
Notes by JBK, posted by JBK