Software Carpentry Workshop at UFSC

Published on December 13, 2014.

Note

This post was previous published at blog.rgaiacs.com. Some links might got broken during the conversion from reStructuredText to Markdown.

Thanks

I would like to thanks to Diego Barneche for the invitation to be one of the instructors of the first Software Carpentry workshop at the Federal University of Santa Catarina.

Diego, I like very much met you in person and love the time in Florianópolis.

Thanks

Also, I wouldd like to thanks Renato Morais Araujo and Juliano A. Bogoni, the local organizer, for the iniciative and hard work to make this workshop possible.

Last Thursday and Friday, Diego and I ran a Software Carpentry workshop at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, based on Florianópolis or Ilha da Magia. This was a R based workshop that also cover Unix Shell and Git.

1rt Day - R

The first day was dedicated to R. Diego taught the basic of R (variables, arithmetic operations) and creation of functions without problems. Some students already knew this basic of R stuffs so they probably got bored during the morning.

After the lunch, I lead a "conversation" about how organize R projects and taught control flow (if/else and for). After a little break, Diego taught the plyr package that, probably, was something new for all the students.

2nd Day - R

The second day started with a lesson about test driver development in R using testthat package by Diego. This was new for all the students.

At Software Carpentry we had some discussion about teaching test due point float computations. Diego only mention point float computation testing to avoid the issues raised at Software Carpentry discussion but the need to write test for functions was made very clear.

2nd Day - Unix Shell

After the test driver development and a break, I taught the Unix Shell. I ran a little bit on this session to cover all the program with some exercises.

As always, wasn't clear for the students why use shell if they could use R but after the first exercise (organizing one repository) and examples of find, sed and convert (from ImageMagick) the students understood why, in some cases, is useful to use the shell.

2nd Day - Git

After the lunch, I taught the Git lesson. This took more time than expected (but I had previously said to Diego that this would probably happen).

We cover all the program with some interruptions when I had to go help some student solve a problem since we didn't had helpers at this workshop.

2nd Day - Wrap

After the Git session, Diego ran a session to wrap what the students saw in this two days. He started the session talking about Open Access and after that we showed knitr and RMarkdown.

Problems

Feedbacks

Note

If you speek Portuguese you can read the raw version of the feedbacks <feedback.md>.

Students like the workshop. As always they complained about much information for little time.

Instructors are prepared and made the lessons available. Since the lessons are available on the internet, we can study later what we didn't follow during the workshop.
Instructors are prepared and made the lessons available. Since the lessons are available on the internet, we can study later what we didn't follow during the workshop.
Many thanks for the instructors to ran this workshop. I belive that you already know the big problem, much information for little time. This type of workshop is very important and I'm sure that it will improve our science skills.
Many thanks for the instructors to ran this workshop. I belive that you already know the big problem, much information for little time. This type of workshop is very important and I'm sure that it will improve our science skills.

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academia,ciência aberta,educação,Software Carpentry

UFSC,Florianópolis

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