Call for Pilot Workshops: Introduction to Conda for (Data) Scientists

An important step in the process of developing a new lesson is the moment when material is taught for the first time by someone other than the original author(s). In our description of the lesson life cycle we refer to these events as beta pilot workshops. After teaching the new lesson material, Instructors provide feedback to the lesson developer(s) to enable the lesson to be further polished in final preparation for an official release.

Several lessons under development in The Carpentries Incubator are approaching the beta pilot stage and today we are reaching out to the community for volunteers to host pilot workshops for the Introduction to Conda for (Data) Scientists curriculum. David Pugh has been developing this lesson since May 2019, and has since taught the material both in-person and online, locally and at international conference sessions.

Are you interested in teaching/hosting a pilot workshop of this material? Here are a few more details to help you decide if the lesson is right for your audience:

• The lesson requires that learners already have the shell and programming skills taught in a Software Carpentry workshop i.e. The Unix Shell and either Plotting and Programming in Python or R for Reproducible Scientific Analysis.
• The material takes 3-5 hours to teach.
• Beta pilot workshops require a minimum of two certified Carpentries Instructors.
• Ideally, beta pilot workshops would take place in January or February 2021.
• Most of the lesson material has no specific technical requirements, but the pilot workshop may include a session on Managing GPU dependencies, which will require learners to have access to a Linux system in order to create the Conda environments (and a graphical processing unit (GPU) in order to use the created environments).

If you would like to host a pilot of the lesson at your institute/organisation, please take a few minutes to fill out this short application form before the end of Wednesday 18 November 2020 (anywhere on Earth). The information collected there will help us coordinate the pilot process and maximise the impact of the process on the lesson material.

If you have any questions about lesson development and the beta pilot process, please contact Toby Hodges.

For more information about the lesson itself, please contact David Pugh.