June 17-28, 2015: A Lesson on Make, AMY 0.4 Released, Opportunities to Contribute, Practical Tips for Running Workshops, and Appointing a Program Coordinator.

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Vacancies

• Software Carpentry is hiring a Program Coordinator. Please see the blog post for more information.

Highlights

• A new lesson on Make has been added to the Software Carpentry repertoire.
• AMY 0.4 was released. New features are listed in the blog post.

Contribute

• Would you like to contribute by recycling previously submitted assessment excercises and adding the best ones to our lessons? It can now easily be done by visiting the newly created repo of submitted MCQs and exercises.
• Learner assessment has been receiving a lot of attention over the past months. A first draft of the new feedback survey is now available. We're looking forward to your comments/contributions.
• Should we change our lesson templates to make use of Jekyll rather than Pandoc? Please contribute to the discussion to help us make an informed decision.
• Greg Wilson summarised lessons learned from teaching instructors. There is again an opportunity for you to contribute to the direction instructor training takes in future. Let us hear from you?

Useful Tips

• Splitting the terminal window allows the instructor to display recent commands while continueing with the lesson at the same time. Read the post by Raniere Silva to see how it's done.

Details

• Workshop debriefing round 11 and debriefing round 12 involved instructors from several workshops. They discussed ways to encourage students to use the etherpad and provide other good suggestions to improve the outcome of your workshops.
• Greg Wilson loooked at research-based course design and discussed the implications of a recent paper by Juha Sorva and Otto Seppälä for Software Carpentry's course design.
• Raniere Silva reviewed their recent workshop at University of Ceará and provided great session-by-session feedback.
• "Software development practices in academia: a case study comparison" written by Derek Groen, Xiaohu Guo, James Grogan, Ulf Schiller, and James Osborne is now avaible from arXiv.org.
• An interesting discussion took place about the design of programming languages.
• Rémi Emonet have posted a review of their recent workshop at CERN. This review again provides some great tips and caveats for other instructors.
• Pauline Barmby discussed her experiences at a recent workshop for women in science and engineering at the University of Toronto.
• Isabell Kiral-Kornek talks about the finding that research papers that publish data sets along with their findings are on average cited 69% more often than their data-less siblings .
• 17 Workshops were run over the last 12 days. For a complete list of recently completed workshops, please visit our website.
• Several workshops have been confirmed for the next few months. Upcoming workshops can be viewed on our website. Newly added workshops are indicated with "*".
• June: Yonsei University
• July: The University of Queensland, SciPy 2015, West Vancouver Memorial Library, The University of Queensland - AMOS sciences, University of Melbourne*, SAP Offices in Feltham, University of Cape Town, Hospital for Sick Children, Curtin University, Harvard University, University of Queensland*