Software Carpentry at Brazilian Open Science Conference

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Last week, Raniere Silva and Alex Viana attended at Brazilian Open Science Conference where they ran a Git course for Software Carpentry and Alex gave a talk about Software Carpentry (like the one that Damien Irving gave at PyCon Australia). Our workshop was a great time and from the feedbacks every student like it. One of the students said:

Very didactic, the instructors showed much care, dedication and attention with the students.

Very good, from the basic to complex in a easy way.

This course was different from most all of previous Git lesson taught by Software Carpentry instructors because (1) we used Git GUI instead of the command line and (2) we teach git fetch and git merge instead of git pull. Related with the use of Git GUI we choose it because we won't have time to teach the shell lessons and all students hadn't an programmer background. I was a little afraid that the GUI will be difficult for students to follow but this didn't happen. About teach git fetch and git merge we do that as one experiment to get data from one of our internal discussion and look like that students didn't problem with that.

Most all the students complain about the short time for the lesson although we had three hours of class. In my opinion this complaints was due, in part, because of the fact that we start the lesson half one hour later since students are later and we need to end it on the scheduled time.

Other complains raised by the students was: have more exercises and explore the doors opened by this tool. I and Alex will try to address this in the others workshops here in Brazil and will be happy to get suggestions on how to do that.