Anthony Scopatz on The Carpentries

Bootcamp Student Composition by Domain

Mon, 30 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Recently I was challenged to show that computational science is important to biologists, and, more importantly, that biologists care about learning how to develop quality software. I am not a biologist. While I find the subject fascinating I cannot make any broad claims on the topic or hope to speak for all biologists. So I turned to Software Carpentry.

My experience teaching Software Carpentry and related bootcamps has been that biologists are always a significant portion of the student population. In order to demonstrate this I asked to have access to anonymized answers to part of the pre-assessment survey. Specifically, I was interested in the "Which of the following most closely aligns with your primary discipline?" question. With a big assist from Amy Brown I obtained the data I was looking for.

Scientific Computing at AIMS

Sun, 15 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Close on the heels of another bootcamp in Madison, WI, for the past two weeks I had the pleasure of teaching a 30 hour scientific computing course at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Cape Town, South Africa. The course was an expansion and refactor of Software Carpentry material to fit the AIMS need. You can find the repository of source material here.

I could gush about how I fell in love with Cape Town, the unexpected preponderance of vegan cafes in Muizenberg, the sea, the sand, the mountains, and la dolce vita I am otherwise used to from Santa Barbara. I will not. AIMS is about the students. Let's examine them after a brief tour of AIMS itself.

University of Chicago in January

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

This last Saturday and Sunday, Katy Huff and I had the pleasure of organizing a Software Carpentry workshop at the University of Chicago. We had 77 people attend in total and by the end of the day on Sunday we remained 45+ strong. (Frankly, who doesn't want to listen to me rant about documentation at 4 pm on a Sunday afternoon?!) This weekend was unique in that we had a host of first time instructors: