Indiana University on The Carpentries

Report on the Indiana Bootcamp

Fri, 26 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Mike Hansen, Jeff Shelton, and Aleksandra Pawlik posted a summary of their recent bootcamp at Indiana University on the Software Sustainability Institute blog, which we've reposted below. It includes some reflections on what works and what doesn't when using IPython Notebooks for teaching, and similarly with virtual machines.

Solution to the First Image Processing Homework

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We had technical issues during yesterday's online tutorial (again), so I have recorded the solution to the image processing exercise we gave the students in Indiana and Toronto. I'd be very grateful for feedback (not just from students): is this a useful way to present ideas? Or should we put our effort into debugging [name of web conferencing software goes here]?

{% assign video_title="Solution to First Image Processing Homework" %} {% assign video_slug="zwl1W4PjaMI" %} {% assign video_time="00:16:25" %} {% include youtube %}

My final code is:

First Homework for Indiana Students (and a few from Ontario)

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We ran our first online tutorial yesterday for students from our recent bootcamp in Indiana (plus a few from Toronto). Despite some technical difficulties with web conferencing, we managed to get through some basic image processing. The learners all now have homework for next week (shown below); considering that most of them have little prior programming experience, and only a half day of Python, it's pretty cool that they're able to do things like this.

How We're Doing

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The first online session for our Indiana University students will run tomorrow afternoon (assuming we can get web conferencing to work—why is this still so hard in 2012?). Meanwhile, our other workshops are filling up quickly:

Site	Start	Ticketed	Space
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute	March 26	17	40
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory	March 28	40	40
University of Chicago	April 2	116	150
Utah State University	April 14	26	50
University College London	April 30	49	50
Michigan State University	May 7	7	40
Newcastle University	May 14	9	40
University of British Columbia	May 22	40	40

and we are now discussing more workshops at other sites: Purdue, Oklahoma, Paris, Melbourne, and possibly ones in South America and Africa as well. If you'd like us to help organize one where you are, please get in touch.

Our Indiana U Workshop Went Well

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Our two-day bootcamp at Indiana U. on March 7 and 8 went well—while less than half of the people who registered actually showed up (more on that in a moment), everyone who did attend the two days seemed to get a lot out of it. Special thanks are due to Prof. Andy Lumsdaine (host), Jennifer Richards (organizer), and Ben Martin, Randy Heiland, Joe Cottam, Mike Hansen, DongInn Kim, and Purdue's own Jeff Shelton for helping out.

Interview: Andrew Lumsdaine of Indiana University

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Today's interview is with Indiana University's Professor Andrew Lumsdaine.

Tell us a bit about your organization and its goals.

One of the reasons the School of Informatics and Computing exists is that computing of various kinds has become part of almost all academic disciplines. The school's goal is to educate students in computer-related areas, as well as traditional computer science, and it's important that the principles of software development be taught. The same holds for my research group, which works in HPC (where the 'P' means both "performance" and "productivity"). There's a huge need for reproducibility in CS research, both for the sake of sound science and also so that people actually can build on each other's work. In order for that to happen, we need some guarantees about quality and reusability, and improving basic skills is a necessary prerequisite.