Software Carpentry: Lessons Learned
This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.
With contributions from:
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Abstract
Over the last 15 years, Software Carpentry has evolved from a week-long training course at the US national laboratories into a worldwide volunteer effort to raise standards in scientific computing. This article explains what we have learned along the way the challenges we now face, and our plans for the future.
Contents
1. Introduction
In January 2012, John Cook posted this to his widely-read blog (Cook2012):
In a review of linear programming solvers from 1987 to 2002, Bob Bixby says that solvers benefited as much from algorithm improvements as from Moore's law: "Three orders of magnitude in machine speed and three orders of magnitude in algorithmic speed add up to six orders of magnitude in solving power. A model that might have taken a year to solve 10 years ago can now solve in less than 30 seconds."
A million-fold speedup is impressive, but hardware and algorithms are only two sides of the iron triangle of programming. The third is programming itself, and while improvements to languages, tools, and practices have undoubtedly made software developers more productive since 1987, the speedup is percentages rather than orders of magnitude. Setting aside the minority who do high-performance computing (HPC), the time it takes the "desktop majority" of scientists to produce a new computational result is increasingly dominated by how long it takes to write, test, debug, install, and maintain software.
The problem is, most scientists are never taught how to do this. While their undergraduate programs may include a generic introduction to programming or a statistics or numerical methods course (in which they're often expected to pick up programming on their own), they are almost never told that version control exists, and rarely if ever shown how to design a maintainable program in a systematic way, or how to turn the last twenty commands they typed into a re-usable script. As a result, they routinely spend hours doing things that could be done in minutes, or don't do things at all because they don't know where to start.
This is where Software Carpentry comes in. We ran 92 two-day workshops between January 2012 and July 2013. In them, more than 100 volunteer instructors helped over 3000 scientists learn about program design, task automation, version control, testing, and other unglamorous but time-tested skills. Two independent assessments in 2012 showed that attendees are actually learning and applying at least some of what we taught; quoting (Aranda2012):
The program increases participants' computational understanding, as measured by more than a two-fold (130%) improvement in test scores after the workshop. The program also enhances their habits and routines, and leads them to adopt tools and techniques that are considered standard practice in the software industry. As a result, participants express extremely high levels of satisfaction with their involvement in Software Carpentry (85% learned what they hoped to learn; 95% would recommend the workshop to others).
Despite these generally positive results, many researchers still find it hard to apply what we teach to their own work, and several of our experiments—most notably our attempts to teach online—have been failures.
2. From Red to Green
Some historical context will help explain where and why we have succeeded and failed.
Version 1: Red Light
In 1995-96, the author organized a series of articles in IEEE Computational Science & Engineering titled, "What Should Computer Scientists Teach to Physical Scientists and Engineers?" (Wilson1996). The articles grew out of the frustration he had working with scientists who wanted to run before they could walk—i.e., to parallelize complex programs that weren't broken down into self-contained functions, that didn't have any automated tests, and that weren't under version control (Wilson2006a).
In response, John Reynders (then director of the Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos National Laboratory) invited the author and Brent Gorda (now at Intel) to teach a week-long course on these topics to LANL staff. The course ran for the first time in July 1998, and was repeated nine times over the next four years. It eventually wound down as the principals moved on to other projects, but several valuable lessons were learned:
- Intensive week-long courses are easy to schedule (particularly if instructors are traveling) but by the end of the second day, attendees brains are full and learning drops off significantly.
- Textbook software engineering is not the right thing to teach most scientists. In particular, careful documentation of requirements and lots of up-front design aren't appropriate for people who (almost by definition) don't yet know what they're trying to do. Agile development methods (which rose to prominence during this period) are a less bad fit to researchers' needs, but even they are not well suited to the "solo grad student" model of working so common in science.
Versions 2 and 3: Another Red Light
The Software Carpentry course materials were updated and released in 2004-05 as point-form slides under a Creative Commons license thanks to support from the Python Software Foundation (Wilson2006b). They were then used twice in a conventional term-long graduate course at the University of Toronto aimed at a mix of students from Computer Science and the physical and life sciences.
The materials attracted 1000-2000 unique visitors/month, with occasional spikes correlated to courses and mentions in other sites. However:
- While grad students (and the occasional faculty member) found the "live" course at Toronto useful, it never found a comfortable institutional home.
- Despite repeated invitations, other people did not contribute updates or new material beyond an occasional bug report. We believe this is related to the previous point: good lessons are narratives, not merely facts presented in sequence, so editing a lesson is more akin to editing a story than to editing a Wikipedia entry.
- Many potential users reported that online lecture notes weren't very useful on their own. As one said, they were sheet music, but novices wanted a performance (and even more, the ability to ask questions).
The first two points deserve further elaboration. Most Computer Science faculty believe this basic material is too easy to deserve a graduate credit (even though a significant minority of their students, particularly those coming from non-CS backgrounds, have no more experience of practical software development than the average physicist). However, other departments believe that courses like this ought to be offered by Computer Science, in the same way that Mathematics and Statistics departments routinely offer service courses. In the absence of an institutional mechanism to offer credit courses at some inter-departmental level, this course, like many other interdisciplinary courses, fell between two stools.
It Works Too Well to be Interesting
We have also found that what we teach simply isn't interesting to most computer scientists. They are interested in doing research to advance our understanding of the science of computing; things like command-line history, tab completion, and "select * from table" have been around too long, and work too well, to be publishable any longer. As long as universities reward research first, and supply teaching last, it is simply not in most computer scientists own best interests to offer this kind of course.
Second, piecemeal improvement is normal in open source development, but Wikipedia aside, it is still rare in other fields. In particular, people often use one another's slide decks as starting points for their own courses, but rarely offer their changes back to the original author in order to improve it. This is partly because educators' preferred file formats (Word, PowerPoint, and PDF) can't be handled gracefully by existing version control systems, but more importantly, there simply isn't a "culture of contribution" in education for projects like Software Carpentry to build on.
The most important lesson learned in this period, though, was even more fundamental. Many faculty in science, engineering, and medicine will agree that their students should learn more about computing. What they won't agree on is what to take out of the current curriculum to make room for it. A typical undergraduate science degree has roughly 1800 hours of class and laboratory time; anyone who wants to add more programming, more statistics, more writing, or more of anything else must either lengthen the program (which is financially and institutionally infeasible) or take something out. However, everything in the program is there because it has a passionate defender who thinks it's vitally important, and who is likely senior to those faculty advocating the change.
It Adds Up
Saying, "We'll just add a little computing to every other course," is a cheat: five minutes per hour equals four entire courses in a four-year program, which is unlikely to ever be implemented. Pushing computing down to the high school level is also a non-starter, since that curriculum is also full.
The sweet spot for this kind of training is therefore the first two or three years of graduate school. At that point, students have time (at least, more time than they'll have once they're faculty) and real problems of their own that they want to solve.
Version 4: Orange Light
The author rebooted Software Carpentry in May 2010 with support from Indiana University, Michigan State University, Microsoft, MITACS, Queen Mary University of London, Scimatic, SciNet, SHARCNet, and the UK Met Office. More than 120 short video lessons were recorded during the subsequent 12 months, and six more week-long classes were run for the backers. We also offered an online class three times (a MOOC avant la lettre).
This was our most successful version to date, in part because the scientific landscape itself had changed. Open access publishing, crowd sourcing, and dozens of other innovations had convinced scientists that knowing how to program was now as important to doing science as knowing how to do statistics. However, most still regarded it as a tax they had to pay in order to get their science done. Those of us who teach programming may find it interesting in its own right, but most scientists clearly want to learn as little as they have to in order to finish the paper whose deadline is looming.
Despite this round's overall success, there were several disappointments:
- Once again, we discovered that five eight-hour days are more wearying than enlightening.
- And once again, only a handful of other people contributed material (Orion Buske, Tommy Guy, Jason Montojo, Jon Pipitone, Ethan White, and Mike Jackson). We believe this was in part because creating videos is significantly more challenging than creating slides. Editing or modifying them is harder still: while a typo in a slide can be fixed by opening PowerPoint, making the change, saving, and re-exporting the PDF, inserting new slides into a video and updating the soundtrack seems to take at least half an hour regardless of how small the change is.
- Most importantly, the MOOC format didn't work: only 5-10% of those who started with us finished, and the majority were people who already knew most of the material. Both figures are in line with completion rates and learner demographics for other MOOCs (Jordan2013), but are no less disappointing because of that.
The biggest take-away from this round was the need come up with a scalable, sustainable model. One instructor simply can't reach enough people, and cobbling together funding from half a dozen different sources every twelve to eighteen months is a high-risk approach.
Version 5: Green Light
Software Carpentry restarted once again in January 2012 with a new grant from the Sloan Foundation, and backing from the Mozilla Foundation. This time, the model was two-day bootcamps like those pioneered by The Hacker Within, a grassroots group of grad students helping grad students at the University of Wisconsin - Madison.
Shortening the bootcamps made it possible for more people to attend, and increased the proportion of material they retained. It also forced us to think much harder about what skills scientists really needed. Out went object-oriented programming, XML, Make, GUI construction, design patterns, software development lifecycles, and other topics. Instead, we focused on a handful of tried-and-true tools that let us introduce higher-level concepts without learners really noticing.
Reaching more people also allowed us to recruit more instructors from bootcamp participants, which was essential for scaling. Switching to a "host site covers costs" model was equally important: we still need funding for the coordinator positions (one full-time at Mozilla, one part-time covered jointly by Mozilla and a donation from Continuum, and part of one staff member's time at the Software Sustainability Institute in the UK), but our other costs now take care of themselves.
Our two-day bootcamps have been an unqualified success. Both the number of bootcamps, and the number of people attending, have grown steadily:
Cumulative Number of Bootcamps
Cumulative Enrolment
More importantly, feedback from participants is strongly positive. While there are continuing problems with software setup and the speed of instruction (discussed below), 80-90% of attendees typically report that they were glad they attended and would recommend the bootcamps to colleagues.
3. What We Do
So what does a typical bootcamp look like?
| Day 1 a.m.: | Introduction to Unix shell. We show participants a dozen basic commands, but the real aim is to introduce them to the ideas of combining single-purpose tools (via pipes and filters) to achieve desired effects, and to getting the computer to repeat things (via command completion, history, and loops) so that people don't have to. |
| Day 1 p.m.: | Version control. We begin by emphasizing how it's a better way to collaborate than FTP or Dropbox, but end by showing them how it's essential for making computational research reproducible. |
| Day 1 p.m.: | If time permits, we close with a relatively light introduction to something that is self-contained and relatively undemanding, such as the basics of regular expressions. |
| Day 2 a.m.: | An introduction to Python (or sometimes R). The real goal is to show them when, why, and how to grow programs incrementally as a set of comprehensible, reusable functions. |
| Day 2 p.m.: | Testing. We introduce the idea of tests as a way to specify what a program is supposed to do, then show participants how to build and run unit tests to ensure that they're making progress rather than just making changes. |
| Day 2 p.m.: | A "beyond mere programming" topic, such as number crunching using NumPy, or an introduction to databases and SQL. |
As the comments on the bullets above suggest, our real aim isn't to teach Python, Git, or any other specific tool: it's to teach computational competence. We can't do this in the abstract: people won't show up for a hand-waving talk, and even if they do, they won't understand. If we show them how to solve a specific problem with a specific tool, though, we can then lead into a larger discussion of how scientists ought to develop, use, and curate software.
We also try hard to show people how the pieces fit together: how to write a Python script that fits into a Unix pipeline, how to automate their unit tests, etc. Doing this gives us a chance to reinforce ideas, and also increases the odds of them being able to apply what they've learned once the bootcamp is over.
Of course, there are a lot of local variations around the template outlined above. Some instructors use the command-line Python interpreter, but a growing number have adopted the IPython Notebook, which has proven to be an excellent teaching and learning environment.
We have also now run several bootcamps using R instead of Python, and expect this number to grow. While some people feel that using R instead of Python is like using feet and pounds instead of the metric system, it is the lingua franca of statistical computing, particularly in the life sciences. A handful of bootcamps also cover tools such as LaTeX, or domain-specific topics such as audio file processing. We hope to do more of the latter going forward now that we have enough instructors to specialize.
We aim for 40 people per workshop, though we have gone as small as 9 and as large as 120. We do not recommend going over 40 in a single room: instead, we try to arrange multiple rooms, and multiple instructors, so that every learner can receive some personal attention. When we do this, we try not to shuffle people from one room to another between the first and second day: with the best inter-instructor coordination in the world, it still results in duplication, missed topics, and jokes that make no sense.
Our bootcamps have traditionally been free, but we are starting to use a small cover charge to discourage no-shows. (We have had bootcamps where only half of those who signed up actually attended, which is demoralizing for instructors and unfair for people left on the waiting list.) Even when we treat this charge as a deposit, and refund it to participants who attended both days, we must be very careful not to trip over institutional rules about commercial use of their space: some universities will charge us hundreds or thousands of dollars per day for using their classrooms if any money changes hands at any point.
Commercial Offerings
Our material is all Creative Commons licensed, so anyone who wants to use it for corporate training can do so without explicit permission from us. We encourage this: it would be great if graduate students could help pay their bills by sharing what they know, in the way that many programmers earn part or all of their living from working on open source software.
What does require permission is use of our name and logo, both of which are trademarked. We're happy to give that permission if we've certified the instructor and have a chance to double-check the content, but we do want a chance to check: we have had one instance of someone calling something "Software Carpentry" when it had nothing to do with what we usually teach. We've worked hard to create material that actually helps scientists, and to build some name recognition around it, and we'd like to make sure our name continues to mean something.
As well as insructors, we rely local helpers to wander the room and answer questions during practicals. These helpers may be participants in previous bootcamps who are interested in becoming instructors, grad students who've picked up some or all of this on their own, or members of the local open source community; where possible, we aim to have at least one helper for every eight learners.
We find workshops go a lot better if people come in groups (e.g., 4-5 people from one lab) or have other pre-existing ties (e.g., the same disciplinary background). They are less inhibited about asking questions, and can support each other (morally and technically) when the time comes to put what they've learned into practice after the bootcamp is over. Group signups also yield much higher turnout from groups that are otherwise often under-represented, such as women and minority students, since they know in advance that they will be in a supportive environment.
4. Small Things Add Up
As in chess, success in teaching often comes from the accumulation of seemingly small advantages. Here are a few of the less significant things we do that we believe have contributed to our success.
Live Coding
We use live coding rather than slides: it's more convincing, it enables instructors to be more responsive to "what if?" questions, and it facilitates lateral knowledge transfer (i.e., people learn more than we realized we were teaching them by watching us work). This does put more of a burden on instructors than a pre-packaged slide deck, but most find it more fun.
Open Everything
Our grant proposals, mailing lists, feedback from bootcamps, and everything else that isn't personally sensitive is out in the open. While we can't prove it, we believe that the fact that people can see us actively succeeding, failing, and learning buys us some credibility and respect.
Open Lessons
This is an important special case of the previous point. Anyone who wants to use our lessons can take what we have, make changes, and offer those back by sending us a pull request on GitHub. As mentioned earlier, this workflow is still foreign to most educators, but it is allowing us to scale and adapt more quickly and more cheaply than the centralized approaches being taken by many high-profile online education ventures.
Use What We Teach
We also make a point of eating our own cooking, e.g., we use GitHub for our web site and to plan bootcamps. Again, this buys us credibility, and gives instructors a chance to do some hands-on practice with the things they're going to teach. The (considerable) downside is that it can be quite difficult for newcomers to contribute material; we are therefore working to streamline that process.
Meet the Learners on Their Own Ground
Learners tell us that it's important to them to leave the bootcamp with their own working environment set up. We therefore continue to teach on all three major platforms (Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows), even though it would be simpler to require learners to use just one. We are experimenting with virtual machines on learners' machines or in the cloud to reduce installation problems, but those introduce problems of their own: older or smaller machines simply aren't fast enough, and again, it's important to many learners to leave with their machines set up.
Collaborative Note-Taking
We often use Etherpad for collaborative note-taking and to share snippets of code and small data files with learners. (If nothing else, it saves us from having to ask students to copy long URLs from the presenter's screen to their computers.) It is almost always mentioned positively in post-workshop feedback, and several bootcamp participants have started using it in their own teaching.
We are still trying to come up with an equally good way to share larger files dynamically as lessons progress: version control does not work, both because our learners are new to it (and therefore likely to make mistakes that affect classmates) and because classroom WiFi frequently can't handle a flurry of multi-megabyte downloads, and other solutions like FTP and Dropbox have similar problems.
Sticky Notes and Minute Cards
Giving each learner two sticky notes of different colors allows instructors to do quick true/false questions as they're teaching. It also allows real-time feedback during hands-on work: learners can put a green sticky on their laptop when they have something done, or a red sticky when they need help. We also use them as minute cards: before each break, learners take a minute to write one thing they've learned on the green sticky, and one thing they found confusing (or too fast or too slow) on the red sticky. It only takes a couple of minutes to collate these, and allows instructors to adjust to learners' interests and speed.
Pair Programming
Pairing is a good practice in real life, and an even better way to teach: partners can not only help each other out during the practical, but clarify each other's misconceptions when the solution is presented, and discuss common research interests during breaks. To facilitate it, we strongly prefer flat seating to banked (theater-style) seating; this also makes it easier for helpers to reach learners who need assistance.
Keep Experimenting
We are constantly trying out new ideas (though not always on purpose). As of June 2013, we have several deliberate experiments on the go:
- Partner and Adapt
- We have built a very fruitful partnership with the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI), who now manage our activities in the UK, and are adapting our general approach to meet particular local needs. As just one example, they are working with the Doctoral Training Centres (DTCs) to find ways to offer Software Carpentry bootcamps to each new cohort of PhD students. We are now actively looking for similar organizations to partner with elsewhere, and would welcome inquiries.
- A Driver's License for HPC
- As another example of this collaboration, we are developing a "driver's license" for researchers who wish to use the DiRAC HPC facility. During several rounds of beta testing, we have refined an hour-long exam to assess people's proficiency with the Unix shell, testing, Makefiles, and other skills. This exam will be deployed in the fall of 2013, and we hope to be able to report on it by mid-2014.
- New Channels
- On June 24-25, 2013, we ran our first bootcamp for women in science, engineering, and medicine. This event attracted 120 learners, 9 instructors, a dozen helpers, and direct sponsorship from several companies, universities, and non-profit organizations. We are already planning a follow-on, and are exploring ways to reach other groups that are traditionally under-represented in computing.
- Smuggling It Into the Curriculum
- Many of our instructors also teach regular university courses, and several of them are now using part or all of our material as the first few lectures in them. We strongly encourage this, and would welcome a chance to work with anyone who wishes to explore this themselves.
5. Instructor Training
To help people teach, we now run an online training course for would-be instructors. It takes 2-4 hours/week of their time for 12-14 weeks (depending on scheduling interruptions), and introduces them to the basics of educational psychology, instructional design, and how these things apply to teaching programming. It's necessarily very shallow, but most participants report that they find the material interesting as well as useful.
Why do people volunteer as instructors?
- To make the world a better place.
- The two things we need to get through the next hundred years are more science and more courage; by helping scientists do more in less time, we are helping with the former.
- To make their own lives better.
- Most of the time, we try to have astronomers teach astronomers, ecologists teach ecologists, and so on. These are people whose tools instructors might one day want to use themselves, so by helping them, instructors are helping themselves.
- To build a reputation.
- Showing up to run a workshop is a great way for people to introduce themselves to colleagues, and to make contact with potential collaborators. This is probably the most important reason from Software Carpentry's point of view, since it's what makes our model sustainable.
- To practice teaching.
- This is also important to people contemplating academic careers.
- To help get people of diverse backgrounds into the pipeline.
- Computing is 12-15% female, and that figure has been dropping since the 1980s. While figures on female participation in computational science are hard to come by, a simple head count shows the same gender skew. Some of our instructors are involved in part because they want to help break that cycle by participating in activities like our bootcamp for women in science and engineering in Boston in June 2013.
- To learn new things, or learn old things in more detail.
- Working alongside an instructor with more experience is a great way to learn more about the tools, as well as about teaching.
- It's fun.
- Our instructors get to work with smart people who actually want to be in the room, and don't have to mark anything afterward. It's a refreshing change from teaching undergraduate calculus...
6. TODO
We've learned a lot, and we're doing a much better job of reaching and teaching people than we did eighteen months ago, but there are still many things we need to improve.
Too Slow and Too Fast
The biggest challenge we face is the diversity of our learners' backgrounds and skill levels. No matter what we teach, and how fast or how slow we go, 20% or more of the room will be lost, and there's a good chance that a different 20% will be bored.
The obvious solution, now that we have enough instructors to implement it, is to split people by level. The problem with that is figuring out what their levels are: if we ask them to assess themselves, they regularly under- or over-estimate their knowledge, while giving them a proficiency test scares away the people we most want to help.
We are currently testing a short pre-assessment questionnaire intended to give instructors a better idea of what their audience knows (and doesn't know) before each bootcamp starts. We hope that will lead to some reliable way to stream learners, but short of one-to-one interviews, we believe this problem will never go away.
Finances
Our second-biggest problem is long-term financial sustainability. The "host site covers costs" model allows us to offer more bootcamps, but we still need to pay for the 2 full-time equivalent coordinating positions at the center of it all. Charging $40-50 per learner would do this, but as mentioned earlier, roughly one third of sites won't let us do this, and it seems unfair to charge some but not others. We are currently exploring other possibilities, including overhead charges for administrative costs and various forms of sponsorship.
Long-Term Assessment
Third, while we believe we're helping scientists, we have not yet done the long-term follow-up needed to prove this. This is partly because of a lack of resources, but it is also a genuinely hard problem: no one knows how to measure the productivity of programmers, or the productivity of scientists, and putting the two together doesn't make the unknowns cancel out.
What we've done so far is collect verbal feedback at the end of every bootcamp (mostly by asking attendees what went well and what didn't) and administer surveys immediately before and afterwards. Neither has been done systematically, though, which limits the insight we can actually glean. We are taking steps to address that, but the larger question of what impact we're having on scientists' productivity still needs to be addressed.
Meeting Our Own Standards
One of the reasons we need to do long-term follow-up is to find out for our own benefit whether we're teaching the right things the right way. As just one example, some of us believe that Subversion is significantly easier for novices to understand than Git because there are fewer places data can reside and fewer steps in its normal workflow. Others believe just as strongly that there is no difference, or that Git is actually easier to learn. While learnability isn't the only concern—the large social network centered around GitHub is a factor as well—we would obviously be able to make better decisions if we had more quantitative data to base them on.
"Is It Supposed to Hurt This Much?"
Fourth, getting software installed is often harder than using it. This is a hard enough problem for experienced users, but almost by definition our audience is inexperienced, and our learners don't (yet) know about system paths, environment variables, the half-dozen places configuration files can lurk on a modern system, and so on. Combine that with two version of Mac OS X, three of Windows, and two oddball Linux installations, and it's almost inevitable that every time we introduce a new tool, it won't work as expected (or at all) for at least one person in the room. Detailed documentation has not proven effective: some learners won't read it (despite repeated prompting), and no matter how detailed it is, it will be incomprehensible to some, and lacking for others.
Edit This
And while it may seem like a trivial thing, editing text is always harder than we expect. We don't want to encourage people to use naive editors like Notepad, and the two most popular legacy editors on Unix (Vi and Emacs) are both usability nightmares. We now recommend a collection of open and almost-open GUI editors, but it remains a stumbling block.
Teaching on the Web
Challenge #5 is to move more of our teaching and follow-up online. We have tried several approaches, from MOOC-style online-only offerings to webcast tutorials and one-to-one online office hours via VoIP and desktop sharing. In all cases, turnout has been mediocre at the start and dropped off rapidly. The fact that this is true of most high-profile MOOCs as well is little comfort...
What vs. How
Sixth on our list is the tension between teaching the "what" and the "how" of programming. When we teach a scripting language like Python, we have to spend time up front on syntax, which leaves us only limited time for the development practices that we really want to focus on, but which are hard to grasp in the abstract. By comparison, version control and databases are straightforward: what you see is what you do is what you get.
We also don't as good a job as we would like teaching testing. The mechanics of unit testing with an xUnit-style framework are straightforward, and it's easy to come up with representative test cases for things like reformatting data files, but what should we tell scientists about testing the numerical parts of their applications? Once we've covered floating-point roundoff and the need to use "almost equal" instead of "exactly equal", our learners quite reasonably ask, "What should I use as a tolerance for my computation?" Saying, "One part in a million, just because," isn't satisfying...
Standardization vs. Customization
Both of the previous points tie into the challenge of standardizing curriculum across a large group of volunteer instructors with very different backgrounds and interests. What we actually teach varies more widely than the content of most university courses with prescribed curricula. We think this is a strength—one of the reasons we recruit instructors from among scientists is so that they can customize content and delivery for local needs—but we need to be more systematic about varying on purpose rather than by accident.
Watching vs. Doing
Finally, we try to make our teaching as interactive as possible, but we still don't give learners hands-on exercises as frequently as we should. We also don't give them as diverse a range of exercises as we should, and those that we do give are often at the wrong level. This is partly due to a lack of time, but disorganization on our part is also a contributing factor.
There is also a constant tension between having students do realistic exercises drawn from actual scientific workflows, and giving them tasks that are small and decoupled, so that failures are less likely and don't have knock-on effects when they occur. This is exacerbated by the diversity of learners in the typical bootcamp, though we hope that will diminish as we organize and recruit along disciplinary lines instead of geographically.
7. Conclusions
To paraphrase William Gibson, the future is already here—it's just that the skills needed to implement it aren't evenly distributed. A small number of scientists can easily build an application that scours the web for recently-published data, launch a cloud computing node to compare it to home-grown data sets, and push the result to a GitHub account; others are still struggling to free their data from Excel and figure out which of the nine backup versions of their paper is the one they sent for publication.
The fact is, it's hard for scientists to do the cool things their colleagues are excited about without basic computing skills, and impossible for them to know what other new things are possible. Our ambition is to change that: not just to make scientists more productive today, but to allow them to be part of the changes that are transforming science in front of our eyes. If you would like to help, we'd like to hear from you.
Bibliography
- [Aranda2012] Jorge Aranda: Report on Software Carpentry. /assets/blob/master/assessment/5.0/aranda-assessment-report-2012-07.pdf, viewed 2013-06-10.
- [Cook2012] John D. Cook: "Moore's law squared". http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2012/01/01/moores-law-squared/, viewed 2013-05-17.
- [Jordan2013] Katy Jordan: "MOOC Competion Rates: The Data". http://www.katyjordan.com/MOOCproject.html, viewed 2013-06-10.
- [Wilson1996] Gregory V. Wilson: "What Should Computer Scientists Teach to Physical Scientists and Engineers?" IEEE Computational Science & Engineering, Summer-Fall 1996.
- [Wilson2006a] Greg Wilson: "Where's the Real Bottleneck in Scientific Computing?" American Scientist, January-February 2006.
- [Wilson2006b] Greg Wilson: "Software Carpentry: Getting Scientists to Write Better Code by Making Them More Productive". Computing in Science & Engineering, November-December 2006.
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