2 - 16 February, 2016: Election Week, University Courses, New Lessons and a Shell Co-Maintainer, An Interview, and Teaching Strategies

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

##Highlights

• The 2016 Software Carpentry Foundation Steering Committee election is on this week. Questions regarding the elections can be addressed to election@software-carpentry.org.
• Daniel Chen has written up a fantasticly informative interview-style post about the challenges and opportunities associated with running Software Carpentry lessons as university course. The post is well-worth the read as there are many different views and ideas that might be relevant in your own context.

##Collaborate

• Great feedback about our collaboratively designed introductory Python lesson has shaped much of what the lesson will look like. How should we proceed with actual development of the lesson? Let us know?
• Alex Konovalov and his colleagues are now developing a Software Carpentry-style lesson on SageMath. If you’re interested to collaborate, please get in touch.

##New

• Ashwin Srinath, a Ph.D. candidate in Mechanical Engineering at Clemson University, is joining Gabriel Devenyi as co-maintainer of the Unix Shell lessons. A big thanks to Christina and all the best to Ashwin!
• A lesson on the computational algebra system GAP has been developed and taught by Alex Konovalov and his colleague
• A recent interview with Greg Wilson by Matthias Fromm and Konrad Förstner is now available as part of their Open Science Radio podcasts.

##Instructor training

• How well is Software Carpentry doing in conveying evidence-based teaching practices, specifically when measured against the six core teaching strategies published in 2007?

##Other

• Ian Hawke from the Centre for Doctoral Training in Next Generation Computational Modelling wrote about his experience in providing context through the use of authentic examples during a recent numerical methods workshop.
• The second/blog/2016/02/instructor-debriefing-round-02.html) and third instructor debriefing session for 2016 covered topics such as finding solutions for installation challenges, a collaborative blog writing excercise for git, wifi challenges, integration of SQL and Python lessons, and using real-world examples to encourage learning.
• We’re comparing stats from online versus in-person instructor training from the last few years. Do you have any suggestions for correlations we could be looking at?
• The Kellogg Biological Station at Michigan State University is running a two-week course on next generation sequencing data analysis for biologists on August 8-19, 2016.
• If you’d like to know how many workshops we’ve similtaneously ran on one day across the world you can now access the raw data or visualise our activity over the last few years.
• What do we know about usability and programming language design? Andreas Stefik and his colleagues have developed a two-pager summarising the knowledge that’s out there.
• 16 workshops were run over the past 15 days. For more information about past workshops, please visit our website
• Upcoming Workhshops
  • February: University of Edinburgh (EPCC), National Institutes of Health, Online, University of Alberta, University College London, Queen’s University, Sir John A. MacDonald Hall Room 2, ACC Cyfronet AGH, University of Calgary, Iowa State University, University of Miami, University of British Columbia Okanagan, UC Davis, Tulane University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Illinois
  • March: Calcul Québec, Université Laval, Alaska Fisheries Science Center / National Marine Fisheries Service, Boston College Libraries, National Networks of Libraries of Medicine, New England Region, Notre Dame, University of Connecticut, EPSRC & MRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Regenerative Medicine, University of Manchester, University of Miami, University of British Columbia, Brock University, University of Connecticut, UNIC Gif-sur-Yvette, University of Washington - Seattle
  • April: Online
  • May: CSDMS Annual Meeting