Software Carpentry Workshop, Jülich, 12-13 October 2015

Last week, myself and David Dotson from
ASU, ran a 2 day Software Carpentry workshop to kick off the CECAM Macromolecular Simulation Software Workshop at the Forschnungzentrum, Jülich. The idea was to give participants who were less well versed in python and working collaboratively with e.g. git a crash course to bring them up to speed for the following five mini-workshops. As you can imagine, coffee and tea are essential for running an intensive bootcamp and we owe thanks to The Software Sustainability Institute for sponsoring our coffee breaks.

 
As we were a self-organised workshop, there was no centrally coordinated surveying of the participants to gauge their level of experience. So instead I sent out a questionnaire very similar to one I’d previously sent before the first workshop I organised back in 2012. As is often the case, the learners were more comfortable with bash and simple python, but hadn’t heard or used testing or version control. Interestingly, compared to this previous workshop a higher proportion of learners were experienced in bash and python. Both groups were drawn from the bimolecular simulation community so this may reflect an increasing level of expertise.

The workshop itself was the smoothest I’ve been involved in; I think it helped that both myself and David have taught several now. Also, devoting three hours for each of bash and version control and then six hours for python (including coffee breaks) meant it wasn’t quite as rushed. The last workshop I taught was in January 2015 and the course materials have been overhauled and updated and separated from the workshop GitHub repository. The latest version of the materials seemed to work well.
It also meant I was unfamiliar with the evolution of ipython notebooks into jupyter notebooks which David used to teach. Interestingly, although there was only one helper, Charlie Laughton, we were never overwhelmed. At each workshop I have taught or organised the ratio of helpers to learners decreased, which may reflect improvements in installation and the course materials.
Finally, I was live coding on my Mac laptop and using the new Split View in Mac OS 10.11 worked really well.

That is what I thought: what about the learners? I had fifteen
responses to the questionnaire which was about a two-thirds response rate. All of them agreed with the statements “I enjoyed the Software Carpentry workshop” and “I feel I learnt something useful that will help my research”, but as we know, enjoyment does not necessarily translate into learning! As before I asked two key questions. First “I now understand enough to try using the following tools/approaches.”. As you can see there is a big shift in attitude compared to before the workshop with the majority of people feeling that they understood the tools covered during the workshop.

But will this translate into a change in behaviour? To try and test this I also asked
“I intend using the tools listed below to help my research”. The results are pretty similar but interestingly peoples intentions were stronger than their understanding, i.e. there was a slightly stronger response to the intention question than the understanding question. Compared to the workshop I ran in Oxford in January 2015, the shift in behaviour was more dramatic, although the two groups were drawn from different research areas so can’t be directly compared.