Lessons on The Carpentries

Welcome to our Newest Lesson Maintainers!

Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that our most recent cohort of Lesson Maintainers have completed onboarding and are ready to support lessons across The Carpentries curricula, including our newest Lesson Program, HPC Carpentry. Seventeen new Maintainers participated in the two hour onboarding, with the following goals:

Orientation to The Carpentries goals and vision for lesson maintenance.
Getting connected with other Maintainers and the overall Maintainer community.
Developing skills for creating a positive environment for all contributors.
Becoming familiar with the key components of the lesson template.
Learning how and when to elevate issues to the Curriculum Advisory Committee.

In addition to the onboarding sessions, Maintainers are eligible to join one of our upcoming GitHub for Maintainers and Lesson Developers professional development courses, equipping them with the skills they need to maintain an open source project effectively.

Calling Community Pilots: 14 New Open Science Lessons for Library Carpentry

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Lessons for Librarians in Open Science Principles and Methods project, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), has reached an exciting milestone. Over the past two years, we’ve worked with 27 expert authors across 14 teams to develop 15 new lesson repositories focused on open science for librarians.

Our 2026-2028 Bridge Strategic Plan is here

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Introducing Our 2026–2028 Bridge Strategic Plan

As we begin a new chapter together as a community, we are excited to share The Carpentries Bridge Strategic Plan for 2026–2028. This plan reflects where we are now as an organisation, what we have learned over the past five years, and how we intend to move forward in alignment with our core values.

The next three years are a bridge. A bridge between our recent period of organisational change and the future we are building together. A bridge between sustaining what works and investing in what is needed next. And a bridge between global growth and deeper, more equitable engagement with communities around the world.

Final Update from Outgoing Maintainer Community Lead, Nathaniel Porter

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For the past 2 years, I have had the privilege of serving The Carpentries as Maintainer Community Lead, a role that has continued to develop and become central to the Carpentries community over the last six years as Angela, Daniel, Vini, and now me have explored what it can be. At the end of September, I am leaving the role to focus on other goals (like fully launching Open Qualitative Research with Taguette and QualCoder Library Carpentry lessons), and so, in keeping with tradition, I get to share one final blog post about my experience.

Welcome to our Newest Lesson Maintainers!

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that our most recent cohort of Lesson Maintainers have completed onboarding and are ready to support lessons across The Carpentries curricula. Thirty new Maintainers participated in the three hour onboarding, with the following goals:

Orientation to The Carpentries goals and vision for lesson maintenance.
Getting connected with other Maintainers and the overall Maintainer community.
Developing skills for creating a positive environment for all contributors.
Becoming familiar with the key components of the lesson template.
Practicing core technical skills for lesson maintenance.
Learning how and when to elevate issues to the Curriculum Advisory Committee.

We are excited to welcome these new members to the Maintainer community and look forward to working with them, along with our many committed continuing Maintainers, over the coming months.

AI Community Discussion Session Report: Case Studies to Inform Curriculum

Thu, 29 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In March, The Carpentries hosted a pair of AI and The Carpentries sessions, the last we currently have planned in this series. These sessions, titled Case Studies to Inform Carpentries Curriculum, were an opportunity to hear directly from community leaders and learn from their teaching experience with and about large language models (LLMs). After several open discussion sessions facilitated by members of the Core Team, we took a deeper dive into the perspectives and expertise of particular community members.

Library Carpentry Curriculum Advisory Committee Announces New Lesson: Introducing Computational Thinking

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

The idea for the Introducing Computational Thinking lesson came from my own experiences of teaching Software Carpentry lessons and learning to code. While Software Carpentry taught the fundamentals of task automation and coding, it did not directly address how to break problems down or how to apply a coding mindset to research questions. As a result, when I tried to apply what I had learned, I found it challenging to break problems down into computable chunks. I therefore saw a lesson on computational thinking as a necessary precursor to learning how to code.

Welcome to our Newest Lesson Maintainers!

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that our most recent cohort of Lesson Maintainers have completed onboarding and are ready to support lessons across The Carpentries curricula. 26 new Maintainers participated in the two hour onboarding, with the following goals:

Orientation to The Carpentries goals and vision for lesson maintanence
Getting connected with other Maintainers and the overall Maintainer community
Developing skills for creating a positive environment for all contributors
Becoming familiar with the key components of the lesson template
Learning how and when to elevate issues to the Curriculum Advisory Committee

New and existing Maintainers were also invited to join a two hour GitHub Skill-up, aiming to teach them how to:

Celebrating The Carpentries Workbench

Mon, 21 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In May 2023, a significant milestone was reached as The Carpentries transitioned all 43 of its official lessons to a new lesson infrastructure, The Carpentries Workbench. This project, led by Zhian Kamvar our Lesson Infrastructure Developer, was a three-year coordinated effort requiring input and contributions from many members of our community. We asked six of them to provide their reflections on the project, its impact, and Zhian’s leadership.

Jennifer Stubbs, Assistant Professor, Bradley University

Community Roles: Community Session Host, Instructor, Maintainer

Join the Genomics Curriculum Advisory Committee!

Thu, 03 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Data Carpentry Genomics Curriculum Advisory Committee is seeking new members, including someone to serve as committee secretary. This is an exciting time to be part of the Genomics CAC, as the committee will soon be considering adoption of the Introduction to R and RStudio for Genomics lesson into the official Data Carpentry Genomics curriculum.

Curriculum Advisory Committees provide high-level oversight, vision, and leadership for a curriculum and guide large-scale updates. Curriculum Advisors meet approximately quarterly, and serve a two-year term. The Carpentries Handbook includes more about what it means to be a Curriculum Advisor.

The 2023 Instructor Notes Drive Starts Next Week!

Sat, 06 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The 2023 Instructor Notes Drive will take place from 8th to 19th May. During these two weeks, we call on the community to help us expand, update, and improve the guidance provided to Instructors on Carpentries lessons. It is a great opportunity to make an impact on the effectiveness of Carpentries lessons, to learn more about how to contribute to lessons, and to practice and develop your skills working with Markdown, Git, and GitHub.

Welcome to our Newest Lesson Maintainers!

Tue, 02 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I am thrilled to share the news that our latest cohort of Lesson Maintainers has completed their onboarding and are now poised to provide valuable support across The Carpentries curricula. Nineteen individuals participated in the comprehensive three-hour onboarding program, which included a wide range of goals and objectives. These included gaining a better understanding of The Carpentries’ vision and goals for lesson maintenance, connecting with other Maintainers and the larger Maintainer community, and developing the necessary skills to create a welcoming and inclusive environment for all contributors. Additionally, participants gained valuable hands-on experience with core technical skills for lesson maintenance.

Get Ready for the Instructor Notes Drive

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

From 8-19th May, we will be coordinating an Instructor Notes Drive: a community-wide effort to update, expand, and improve guidance provided to Instructors in lessons.

What are Instructor Notes?

Instructor Notes are pieces of advice, guidance, warnings, resources, etc for those teaching a lesson, to help them prepare and teach their workshops more effectively. Until now, Instructor Notes have been kept in a dedicated page, located under the “Extras” dropdown menu of a lesson site.

Join us in Welcoming our New Maintainers!

Tue, 12 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that our most recent cohort of Lesson Maintainers have completed onboarding and are ready to support lessons across The Carpentries curricula. Seven new Maintainers completed independent study of the Maintainer onboarding curriculum, and demonstrated completion of the following goals:

Orientation to The Carpentries goals and vision for lesson maintenance
Getting connected with other Maintainers and the overall Maintainer community
Developing skills for creating a positive environment for all contributors
Becoming familiar with the key components of the lesson template
Practicing core technical skills for lesson maintenance
Learning how and when to elevate issues to the Curriculum Advisory Committee

Welcome to our Newest Lesson Maintainers!

Thu, 23 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that our most recent cohort of Lesson Maintainers have completed onboarding and are ready to support lessons across The Carpentries curricula. Thirty new Maintainers participated in the three hour onboarding, with the following goals:

Orientation to The Carpentries goals and vision for lesson maintenance.
Getting connected with other Maintainers and the overall Maintainer community.
Developing skills for creating a positive environment for all contributors.
Becoming familiar with the key components of the lesson template.
Practicing core technical skills for lesson maintenance.
Learning how and when to elevate issues to the Curriculum Advisory Committee.

We are excited to welcome these new members to the Maintainer community and look forward to working with them, and continuing to work with our many committed continuing Maintainers, over the coming months. If you are interested in becoming a Maintainer in the future, stay tuned for announcements of our yearly Maintainer Onboarding sessions.

Foundations of Astronomical Data Science Launch

Tue, 05 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The long-awaited Data Carpentry curriculum for working with astronomical data is now available to teach! The Foundations of Astronomical Data Science curriculum was actively developed during the COVID-19 pandemic by the Astronomy Curriculum Data Carpentry Committee (ACDC; composed of Erin Becker, Azalee Bostroem, Allen Downey, Rodolfo Montez Jr., Brett Morris, and Phil Rosenfield) and has undergone The Carpentries incubation process including two alpha workshops and two beta workshops. The first official offering of the stable curriculum will be at the summer meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) this June in Pasadena, CA. This is the first new curriculum released by The Carpentries since August 2018 and represents the first curriculum designed for intermediate learners! The curriculum is now ready for any certified Instructor to teach! Keep reading to learn more.

Launching Lesson Publication Task Force

Tue, 05 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Members of The Carpentries community contribute to official lessons in a number of ways, including lesson development, contributing edits and updates to content, and serving as Maintainers. We want to acknowledge these contributions on official lesson publications, which requires processes for scheduling lesson publications and determining authorship.

The Carpentries is launching a Task Force on the official lesson publication process, and we are seeking community members to participate in several meetings. We are looking for community members who are interested in lesson publication and how to ensure that contributions are appropriately recognized and communicated internally and externally. The Task Force will have a set number of meetings and concrete goals of developing guidelines for determining authorship and scheduling official lesson publications. Specific times will be determined once the Task Force membership is set.

Apply to become a Curriculum Advisor

Tue, 14 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In August 2021, we announced that The Carpentries is reactivating our Curriculum Advisory program. Curriculum Advisory Committees provide high-level oversight, vision, and leadership for a curriculum and guide large-scale updates. Each Curriculum Advisory Committee (CAC) supports and is supported by a group of Lesson Maintainers, who focus on day-to-day maintenance of the lessons.

Joining one of the Curriculum Advisory Committees (CACs) is an excellent opportunity to engage with The Carpentries and be directly involved with the development and leadership of our Curricula.

Welcome to our Newest Lesson Maintainers!

Mon, 13 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that our most recent cohort of Lesson Maintainers have completed onboarding and are ready to support lessons across The Carpentries curricula. Eighteen new Maintainers participated in the three hour onboarding, using a completely updated curriculum with the following goals:

Orientation to The Carpentries goals and vision for lesson maintanence
Getting connected with other Maintainers and the overall Maintainer community
Developing skills for creating a positive environment for all contributors
Becoming familiar with the key components of the lesson template
Practicing core technical skills for lesson maintanence
Learning how and when to elevate issues to the Curriculum Advisory Committee

Reflecting on our first Alpha Test of the Lesson Infrastructure Redesign

Tue, 06 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

This is an ongoing series of blog posts about the next iteration of the [Lesson Infrastructure]({{ site.url }}/posts-by-tags/#lesson-infrastructure). Find more about our Design Principles and our Path to the Design for the Lesson Website

As our community has grown in the past few years, it has become evident that our current lesson infrastructure—where implementing updates involves complex manual steps—does not scale well. It was also evident that the lesson development toolchain was intimidating enough that it was—in and of itself—a barrier to contribution. When this infrastructure was created back in 2016, we had only a few lessons that were maintained by a small group of maintainers who were able to install the toolchain and render them locally. We now have more than 100 official and community-developed lessons combined. Based on the feedback from our much larger maintainer community, it is clear that many find it challenging to keep the infrastructure up-to-date on their own machines.

Core Team 'Acc-athon' to Add Alt Text Across Carpentries Curricula

Thu, 22 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

At the end of March, the Core Team had an “Acc-athon”, or accessibility hackathon, led by Erin Becker, where we worked together to add and improve alt text across Carpentries curricula.

What is alt text?

Alternative text or alt text is an HTML element that describes the appearance and function of an image on a page. Alt text serves several functions. It appears in place of an image if the image is broken. It enhances the discoverability of content, because search engines can index alt text. But, perhaps most crucially, alt text makes web content more accessible. If someone uses a screen reader, when the screen reader gets to an image, it will dictate the alt text in place instead.

Integration and reuse of Library Carpentry content into curricula

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Library Carpentry website

By Jeff Oliver, Julie Goldman and Konrad Förstner

There is a growing need to teach students professional data handling skills. Luckily, nobody has to start from scratch for this. While the lessons of The Carpentries including the Library Carpentry lesson program are designed to be taught as defined combinations in two-day workshops, they can be reused in other contexts. In this blog post members of the Library Carpentry community describe how they include Library Carpentry lessons in academic curricula and use the training methods to teach computational skills to students.

Announcing our new Maintainer Community Lead

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Hello everyone! I am excited to be joining The Carpentries as the next Maintainer Community Lead. The previous lead, Angela Li, has left me some large shoes to fill, in building and sustaining the Maintainer community, and I hope to build on what she has already created.

I joined Software Carpentry in 2014. Since then, I have maintained lessons and have taught numerous workshops, and just finished up my Carpentries Trainer Training. I am currently a PhD Student at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in the eastern United States, looking at data science education in the biomedical sciences, where my work is heavily inspired by The Carpentries.

Geospatial Data Carpentry Videos

Wed, 19 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR

Instructors at the University of Wisconsin (at both Madison and Milwaukee) recorded videos of the Geospatial Data Carpentry Workshop They then held discussion sessions over the course of a week to discuss the videos the learners had watched Learners really enjoyed this setup and gave really good feedback. Instructors are still working on setting expectations about the setup better.

The Setup

Since mid-March, when the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus announced it would be temporarily closing, exploring methods for successfully teaching interactive coding workshops has been a continual discussion among our local community of Carpentries instructors. As The Carpentries staff like to say, the transition to online workshops has been a “chopportunity” (challenge-opportunity).

Design principles for the next iteration of The Carpentries lesson template

Mon, 10 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post introduces twelve design principles that will guide the development of the next version of The Carpentries lesson template. First, we provide some background and definitions. If you are more interested in the principles themselves, you can skip forward to the Design Principles section.

Background

In The Carpentries’ history (including Data Carpentry, Library Carpentry, and Software Carpentry), we have learned a lot about lesson templates. We have had two main versions of the template that relied on GitHub Pages. As the community grows, we are adding more lessons through [our community-developed lessons]({{ site.url }}/community-lessons/) (The Carpentries Incubator and The Carpentries Lab) every week; and we are starting to see the limitations of our current workflow. Given changes in the tools and infrastructure, we are envisioning the next iteration of the lesson template.

Primera experiencia traduciendo lecciones online dentro de la CarpentryCon@HOME

Tue, 04 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

See English translation below.

¿Y tú cómo traducirías esta palabra?

CarpentryCon@HOME traduciendo

En la sprint the CarpentryCon el 20-21 de Julio se comenzó a traducir la leccion de R para datos geoespaciales de Data Carpentry. Nuestro avance ha sido increíble, en unas horas se logró traducir el 80% de la lección utilizando la plataforma Transifex. (agregar la foto aquí).

Junto con David, Paula y Florencia compartimos toda la sesión, permitiendo unirse a gente de todo el mundo en la franja horaria que fuese más conveniente para ellos.

Upgrading R Lessons to use R 4.0

Mon, 03 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Summary and timeline

In April 2020, R officially released version 4.0. One of the major changes was the removal of the default stringsAsFactors = TRUE when reading in data frames. This was tentatively announced in late July 2019 and officially announced in February 2020. While this change has been seen as a good thing by the majority of the R community as a step towards reducing common pitfalls, it produces an interesting pedagogical challenge for some of our lessons that use errors and warnings generated from this default behavior as mechanisms to introduce learners to the concept of factors.

Announcing Glosario

Tue, 28 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

glosario is an open source glossary of terms used in data science that is available online and also as a library in both R and Python. Authors can add glossary keys to a lesson’s metadata to indicate what the lesson teaches, what learners ought to know before they start, and where they can go to find that knowledge. Authors can also use the library’s functions to insert consistent hyperlinks for terms in their lessons in any of several (human) languages, and anyone who has installed the library can use it interactively to look things up while they are programming.

Building the Maintainer Community and Your Own Skillset

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past nine months, I have had the pleasure of serving as The Carpentries first Maintainer Community Lead. What started as a way to negotiate a Platinum Membership for my institution quickly became a way to get plugged into a large community of lesson maintainers, support others as they learned to maintain and support our curriculum materials, and multiply my impact in the community by empowering others to take the lead on our curricula.

Welcome to our Newest Lesson Maintainers!

Wed, 15 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We are delighted to announce that our most recent cohort of Lesson Maintainers have completed their onboarding and received their badges! We had over 30 individuals participate in Maintainer Onboarding over the past month, including 8 existing Maintainers. We are excited to welcome these new members to the Maintainer community and look forward to working with them, and continuing to work with our many committed continuing Maintainers, over the coming months. We’d first like to thank several continuing Maintainers who participated in the onboarding. The insights and experience these folks were able to bring to the discussions were invaluable. Thank you Maxim Belkin, Sarah Stevens, Kat Koziar, Clarke Iakovakis, and Shari Laster!

Carpentries Conversations: The Carpentries Teaching of Git and GitHub

Mon, 04 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Prompted by various tweets by our community members, and related community deliberations in The Carpentries’ Slack and TopicBox in December 2019, The Carpentries Core Team saw an opportunity for broader community discussions around instructors’ interest or comfort in teaching git and GitHub as outlined in our lesson programs.

We conferred with The Carpentries’ Curriculum Advisory Group who agreed to facilitate a series of Themed community discussions around The Carpentries Teaching of GitHub. This blog post summarises community input from three separate discussions in December 2019, and outlines a way forward for continued deliberations.

Being a Carpentries Maintainer and the Skills You Can Learn

Wed, 01 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Back in 2016, I wrote a blog post about “What the Carpentries Mean To Me” and it traced how everything I know these days stems from my first SWC workshop in 2013. I still hold the same sentiment today.

In the past few years, one of the biggest skills I have become more fluent in is Git version control and collaboration. As a part of Carpentry instructor onboarding, we are asked to submit a Pull Request to an existing lesson. This serves as a litmus test to make sure things are working and you’ve gone through the collaboration process at least once (nobody is expecting a full understanding of Git). But, maintainers do need to be somewhat comfortable with Git.

Apply for Carpentries Maintainer Onboarding!

Tue, 31 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We are excited to announce that we are now accepting applications for anyone interested in becoming a Carpentries Lesson Maintainer!

Maintainers sustain our lessons and curricula over the long run, and we are looking forward to bringing on a new cohort of Maintainers to support our lessons. Additionally, we are opening up Maintainer Onboarding to existing Maintainers who wish to further advance their skills to better serve their lessons.

Our goals are to support Maintainers with training to successfully manage their lessons. Additionally, we hope to better serve those who contribute to lessons by encouraging timely response to their contributions. Finally, we hope to build out the Maintainer community through more regular onboarding.

We Appreciate Lesson Maintainers!

Thu, 19 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We would like to sincerely thank the Data Carpentry, Library Carpentry, and Software Carpentry lesson Maintainers for their behind-the-scenes work that makes all of our workshops and independent learning possible.

Across our three Lesson Programs, we have 111 Maintainers, who work in teams to evaluate, respond to, and incorporate feedback and suggestions for improvement from workshop Instructors, helpers, learners, and folks who are using our lessons for independent learning. Our 111 Lesson Maintainers support our 51 official Carpentries lessons and workshop overview pages, and help provide feedback on our lesson template to guide its development.

We are Hiring Four New Team Members. Join Our Team.

Tue, 26 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries is hiring!

The Carpentries is searching for four new full-time team members to join our global, mission-driven organisation. These new roles will work with and serve our volunteer community - comprised of 50,000 learners, 2,000 instructors, 80 Trainers, and 85 member organisations from research institutions around the world. See below for descriptions and links to apply.

Deputy Director of Instructor Training

We are hiring a Deputy Director of Instructor Training to support our global Instructor Training community, train and onboard new Instructor Trainers (who teach our Instructors), and develop an assessment strategy to examine the impact of our Instructor Training and Trainer Training programs.

22 Months in the Making: New Genomics Curriculum Release

Mon, 08 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

All of The Carpentries lessons focus on teaching core skills, rather than particular tools. But, as Greg Wilson says, “We have to use something” to teach those skills. Because we do use particular tools in our teaching, we frequently need to balance the need for lesson stability against the need to stay up to date with new technology.

In November 2017, Data Carpentry released a curriculum for working with genomic sequencing data. Work on this curriculum had started all the way back in 2014, and at the end of 2017 had reached a stable state where the lessons were ready to be taught by people outside of the original development group. This workshop teaches genomics researchers how to manage their data, access data from popular sequencing databases, automate their analysis pipelines by writing custom Bash scripts, and compute in the cloud. It’s targeted at complete novices, with no previous programming experience, and is designed to help research teams level-up their computational skills and get more done in less time.

Announcing the June 2019 lesson release!

Tue, 02 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

As a community committed to iterative improvement, our lessons are never done. Every day, Maintainers receive feedback and contributions to help our lessons run more smoothly, stay up to date with technology changes, and be accessible to more audiences. Despite (or maybe because of!) this constant improvement, it’s important to take the time to celebrate our progress and to give credit to the hundreds of people who make our lessons the wonderful resource they are for the tens of thousands of learners who attend our workshops and use our materials online.

Developing Data Skills at Macquarie University Library

Tue, 25 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Library Carpentry website

By Grai Calvey, Fiona Jones and Heather Cooper

In 2016, Macquarie University delivered a Data Science and eResearch Platform Strategy. In response, the Library embarked on a series of initiatives including:

Developing workshops to improve the data skills of all our library staff
To grow confidence when engaging in data science practice, eResearch conversations and the support of researchers

Our three goals were to:

36 lessons will be published, which ones will you contribute to?

Wed, 15 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries lessons continuously change and improve through individual contributions from Instructors, workshop helpers, learners, and other users of the lessons. These contributions are guided by our lesson Maintainers, who also participate in and often lead large-scale updates to their lessons. To provide tangible credit for the work done by Maintainers and other contributors, we periodically publish our lessons on Zenodo, which provides a citable work product (DOI) that contributors can put on their CV or resume. Since our last coordinated lesson release in August 2017, many Library Carpentry lessons have become stable and ready for their first release. Several Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry lessons have also had major updates during this time period and are ready to release a new version.

What have the Library Carpentry Maintainers been working on?

Thu, 25 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Library Carpentry website

By Chris Erdmann

In January 2019, the Library Carpentry Maintainers met online to discuss a variety of topics from communication channels to giving credit. The discussions helped with tackling big questions and understanding how we wanted to work as Maintainers.

See News from the Library Carpentry Maintainer Community and Curriculum Advisory Committee

What have the Maintainers been up to since then? This blog post will catch you up on what all the lesson Maintainer teams have been doing since January. The following are brief reports from the lesson Maintainer groups:

Traducción al español de Ecología con Python, una lección de Data Carpentry

Tue, 22 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Read the English version of this blog post here.

Entre septiembre de 2017 y mayo de 2018 desarrollamos una iniciativa impulsada por la comunidad para traducir las lecciones de Software Carpentry al español. Su resultado fue la producción de tres lecciones de alta calidad, que pueden utilizarse para enseñar un taller de Software Carpentry consistente de La Terminal de Unix, Control de Versiones con Git, y R para Análisis Científicos Reproducibles.

El siguiente paso lógico para potenciar la cartera de lecciones en español de The Carpentries era traducir una lección de Data Carpentry basada en Python. En noviembre de 2018 iniciamos y completamos un esfuerzo comunitario para crear Análisis y visualización de datos usando Python.

Data Carpentry Python Ecology Lesson Translated into Spanish

Thu, 17 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Lee la versión en español de esta publicación aquí.

From September 2017 to May 2018, there was a community-driven effort to translate the Software Carpentry lessons into Spanish, and the result was the production of three high-quality lessons that can be used to teach a Software Carpentry Workshop consisting of La Terminal de Unix, Control de Versiones con Git, and R para Análisis Científicos Reproducibles.

The next logical step to enhance The Carpentries portfolio of Spanish lessons was to translate a Python-based Data Carpentry lesson. In November 2018, we initiated and completed a community-driven project to create Análisis y visualización de datos usando Python.

Library Carpentry Is Now Officially a Lesson Program!

Fri, 02 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

By Tracy Teal and Chris Erdmann

Library Carpentry is now officially a Lesson Program!

On 1 November 2018, The Carpentries Executive Council voted to officially approve Library Carpentry as a Lesson Program. It now joins Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry as official Lesson Programs. While the vote was quick, the work to become an official Lesson Program spans across many years involving many community members and their contributions. As noted in a recent blog post, over two hundred instructors and helpers have contributed to hosting, teaching, mentoring, developing, and maintaining Library Carpentry since 2015. Nearly three hundred events have been hosted by libraries since 2015 and interest from libraries in Library Carpentry and The Carpentries continues to grow. The library community’s contributions to The Carpentries is an important piece of our continued success and we too see their strategic value to growing our efforts at organisations across the world!

Curriculum Development Goals for the Rest of 2018

Mon, 22 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

As we are entering the last quarter of 2018, and following up on our Curriculum Development Vision post, we want to outline plans for the rest of the year and the beginning of 2019. We plan to post regular updates on curriculum development plans as updates and calls for participation in particular activities or teaching updated materials. For each set of curriculum there are Curriculum Advisory Committees and there is an overall Lesson Infrastructure Committee. If you are interested in being involved in lesson activities, please check out the issues on any of the lessons, send an email to team@carpentries.org, or join one of the lesson-specific email lists for more information or questions.

Library Carpentry’s Next Step Towards Becoming a Carpentries Lesson Program

Mon, 15 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

By Chris Erdmann, Tracy Teal, John Chodacki

What Does It Mean to Be a Lesson Program?

When Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry merged to become The Carpentries, one of the important things we needed to figure out was what it meant to be ‘a Carpentry’ within The Carpentries. Originally called Lesson Organisations in the merger discussions, they have been updated to be called ‘Lesson Programs’ in the current draft of the bylaws.

The idea for the Lesson Programs is that The Carpentries as an organisation can provide the operational and governance capacity and framework, and the Lesson Programs can focus on the goals, audience, and content of the curriculum within their program. This meant that Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry could retain the spirit of their lessons and community enthusiasm for those areas, while aligning operations around Membership, workshops, instructor training and other capacity building activities. It also created a pathway for new Lesson Programs, particularly for Library Carpentry, which was already an active community with a developing curriculum and interim governance group. We knew that working with Library Carpentry was on the short-term horizon.

Three Years in the Making for Instructor Training in Latin America

Mon, 27 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This month I (Rayna Harris) co-taught a remote The Carpentries Instructor Training Workshop for 25 Spanish-speaking trainees in six countries in Latin America. It was awesome! One thing that made this workshop so special for me is that it has been three-plus years in the making. So, I thought I would tell the story, from my perspective, about all the things that came into play to make this workshop a reality.

Report: Lesson Infrastructure Breakout at CarpentryCon

Thu, 14 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

One of the breakout sessions at CarpentryCon focussed on lesson infrastructure: the template we use for our lessons and how this template and the platform that we use to deliver this material (GitHub Pages & Jekyll) could be improved/better utilised. The session was led by François Michonneau, our Curriculum Development Lead, with notes taken by Toby Hodges. This blogpost is a summary of the discussion in that session. You can see the original notes on this etherpad.

Maintaining Lessons - Community Perspectives

Tue, 03 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Our September community call on lesson maintenance brought up many good ideas around the lesson maintenance process for Software and Data Carpentry lessons. If you weren’t able to make the call, below is a summary of our discussion and potential avenues for growth.

Our discussion focused around two major questions: what do the lesson maintainers do, and what are some of the reasons to be a lesson maintainer?

Software Carpentry Lesson Maintenance: Be Part of the Conversation!

Tue, 19 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Come share your experience and ideas about maintaining the Software Carpentry lessons

We invite all members of the Software Carpentry community to participate in two upcoming events centered around maintaining our lessons:

Community Call this week on Thursday, September 21
Task Force for the future of the Software Carpentry lesson organization

Community Call

We will be discussing lesson maintenance on this week’s community call, happening on Thursday.
On the call, we’ll gather community aspirations and concerns about the current lessons and their maintenance. We also will ask for everyone’s input on how we can best support and recognize the valuable work of our maintainers and contributors. See the etherpad for times, agenda and to sign up. Anyone from the community is welcome to join.

Publishing our lessons, Version 2017.08

Thu, 24 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We are pleased to announce the latest publication of Software Carpentry lesson materials, from release Version 2017.08. Although most of our lessons are fairly mature, we had
almost 100 new contributors. We have used this opportunity to improve the process through which lessons are released, some parts of which were previewed in this blog post. This release includes linked ORCID identifiers (visible on the Zenodo page next to the author’s name) and has allowed for individuals to opt-out as contributors. You can learn about the release process on GitHub, and can view this and previous archived versions on the release page.

Credit for lesson contributors

Sun, 16 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

In 2016, Software Carpentry instituted a twice-yearly release schedule for our lessons (see here for previous releases). Lesson releases, representing a snapshot in time of the material’s development, are published through Zenodo and given a DOI for citation purposes. Releases serve a few purposes, primarily to provide a trackable record of the development of our materials and to allow attribution to community members who contribute to lessons. The lesson maintainers are included as editors, while all other contributors who have made changes (as tracked through GitHub) are represented as authors.

How to print our lessons?

Mon, 08 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

From the time that I joined Software Carpentry, I remember two feature requests that often showed up on our list of issues. The first one was links to help navigate the lessons and the second one was a way to print the lessons. Adding these two features was challenging because the limited information that is available as metadata by Jekyll (or Pandoc, which we used for a while). In addition, we want to have a “real” solution, instead of a workaround that is going to stop work in a few months. Although as software developers we knew that at every release of Jekyll, or any other library, that we are using exist a chance that our pipeline will break.

Programming with GAP

Fri, 18 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Links to the GAP lesson in this blog post have been updated to reflect the lesson moving to The Carpentries Incubator.

Software Carpentry is more than just a set of workshops and lessons. It is also a way to develop lessons, one that we have used successfully to create a lesson on Programming with GAP.

GAP is an open source system for discrete computational algebra. It provides a programming language with the same name; thousands of functions implementing various algebraic algorithms; and data libraries containing extensive collections of algebraic objects. GAP distribution includes its detailed documentation; even more materials on learning GAP and on using it in teaching a variety of courses are available on GAP homepage here.

Python as a Second Language

Tue, 04 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Donny Winston, Joey Montoya, and I taught a one-day class for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on Python as a Second Language last week. As its introductory blurb says, “This lesson is an introduction to programming in Python for people who are already comfortable in some other language such as Perl or MATLAB.” The notes are still very much under development, but having delivered it twice, we’re pretty confident that it can actually be delivered in one day. We would be very grateful for feedback: please file issues in the GitHub repository to let us know what you think, to add more exercises and bullet points, or anything else.

Heuristic Evaluation for Novice Programming Systems

Tue, 02 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I have recently been reading and enjoying a new paper by Michael Kölling and Fraser McKay titled “Heuristic Evaluation for Novice Programming Systems”. In it, the authors say:

With the proliferation of competing systems [for novices], the problem [of evaluation ] has become more complicated. Not only should we ask the question whether such kinds of tools are helpful at all (which many instructors strongly believe them to be, even in the absence of hard evidence), but we need to decide which of a significant number of competing systems is “better” for a given task in a given context. Educators have to make choices, not only between using an educational IDE or not, but between a number of direct competitors.

Lesson Incubation

Tue, 19 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry Steering Committees recently approved [a process for supporting the incubation of new lessons. The goal is to provide a clear path for creating new material and getting it into the hands of people who can teach it while taking into account the resources we have available and the need to maintain lessons as well as create them. If you would like to build something substantial for either of the Carpentries, we’d enjoy hearing from you. (Please also see the announcement on the Data Carpentry site.)

Publishing Our Lessons, Version 2016.06

Tue, 19 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We are very pleased to announce the publication of Version 2016.06 of the Software Carpentry lessons. Thanks to a lot of hard work by their maintainers and Rémi Emonet (who has acted as release manager), we have:

removed the need to build and commit HTML (everything except our R lessons is now pure Markdown);
updated the appearance of the templates (including a top menu, a nicer color scheme, and previous/next links); and
merged over 3100 pull requests from over 200 people.

Our materials are far from perfect, but we're very proud of what our community has built. Please see the releases page for links to the archived release, and the main lessons page for links to the updated lessons.

Questions, Answers, and Lessons

Sun, 24 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

While working on an outline of a new lesson on Python, I began thinking about the overall coherence of what we teach. In particular, I started to worry that we might be teaching some things because we teach them, i.e., that the curriculum might lose its connection to researchers' actual issues.

One method for keeping things grounded in the other field I still occasionally work in (empirical software engineering) is called Goal, Question, Metric. As the name suggests, it defines three questions: what are you trying achieve, what questions do you need answered in order to achieve it, and what metrics will you accept as answers to those questions. An educational equivalent is Question, Answer, Lesson: what questions do novices have, what answers do competent practitioners give them, and what lessons are needed to teach those answers. (The "do novices have" modifier is crucial: in order for our workshops to be appealing, they must answer the questions that novices actually have, not the ones we wish they would ask.)

Designing a New Novice Python Lesson

Sun, 10 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Last November, I volunteered to pull together a new full-day lesson on Python suitable for people with no previous programming experience. It has taken longer to come together than I expected, but that’s partly because I saw it as an opportunity to create a full-length example of the “backward” lesson design method we teach in the instructor training class.

What we have so far is in this GitHub repository, which is rendered at this site. We would be very grateful for input: if you think crucial topics have been left out, please say so, while if there’s stuff that could be removed or re-ordered, please say that as well.

Maintaining a Lesson

Mon, 04 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

After two years as a Software Carpentry lesson maintainer of r-novice-inflammation, I am stepping down so that I can spend more time on my research (this thesis appears unwilling to write itself) and with my family. This therefore seems like a good time to summarize what’s happened and what I’ve learned for the benefit of anyone planning to become a maintainer.

A Bit of Background

Software Carpentry really started growing the number of workshops and instructors in 2012. At the time, there were two main sets of lessons in place: the version 4 SWC lessons written by Greg Wilson and others in 2010-11, and a set developed by The Hacker Within, a student group at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. (These were referred to as the THW lessons, and can be found in the old boot-camps repository.)

New Maintainers

Thu, 17 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We are pleased to announce that [Harriet Dashnow]({{site.baseurl}}/team/#dashnow_harriet) and [Daniel Chen]({{site.baseurl}}/team/#chen_daniel) have agreed to take over maintenance of [the R inflammation lesson]({{site.github_url}}/r-novice-inflammation). Our thanks to them for volunteering, and to [John Blischak]({{site.baseurl}}/team/#blischak_j) and [Denis Haine]({{site.baseurl}}/team/#haine_denis) for all their hard work over the past year and more.

We are also grateful to Erik Bray, who has volunteered to take over maintenance of our Windows installer. As we have grown, we have come to depend on our community to do more than just teach (and yes, I just said “just”). If you would like to get involved in maintaining lessons, mentoring new instructors, or other non-teaching tasks, please give us a shout.

A Counterpoint to Collaborative Lesson Design

Tue, 16 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Discussion of our proposed lesson on [on modern scientific authoring]({{site.github_url}}/modern-scientific-authoring) is an instructive counterpoint to our previous post extolling the virtues of [collaborative lesson development]({{site.baseurl}}/blog/2016/02/designing-lessons-collaboratively.html). The aim of the lesson is to show researchers how to write and publish in the early 21st Century---or more honestly, to persuade them to stop mailing each other copies of Microsoft Word files and start using something else. After a long-winded opening (which I'll cut substantially), the [current introduction]({{page.site}}/01-mess.html) summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of six options:

WYSIWYG on the desktop (Microsoft Word).
WYSIWYG on the web (Google Docs).
Desktop typesetting (LaTeX).
Web-based typesetting hybrids (Authorea, Overleaf).
HTML.
Markdown.

It concludes that for the foreseeable future, many researchers will continue to prefer WYSIWYG tools rather than typesetting tools requiring compilation (such as LaTeX and Markdown). However, since most researchers are already familiar with WYSIWYG tools, and since typesetting tools are easier to integrate into reproducible workflows, the lesson will focus on LaTeX for mansucripts and Markdown for the web.

Designing Lessons Collaboratively

Mon, 15 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

A few days ago, I asked for feedback on a new Python lesson aimed at people who've never programmed before. The [outline]({{site.github_url}}/python-novice-gapminder/blob/gh-pages/index.md) had already received several rounds of feedback from a handful of people, but there were still lots of comments:

As always, the choice of tools attracted a lot of discussion. Jeremy Metz opened by saying, “I worry that the use of a more abstract environment like the Jupyter Notebook might confuse and add an additional barrier to people wanting to ‘really’ use Python.” I agree that the Notebook imposes an extra cognitive load, since it’s so different from anything else novices are likely to have seen, but it has become the tool of choice for many scientists for good reasons: it’s stable, cross-platform, encourages reproducible practices, and has a great, supportive community. We’re also starved for alternatives: the audience for this class isn’t required to have seen the shell, so running scripts from the command line is out, and all of the Python IDEs we’ve tried have significant shortcomings for our audience.

Announcing New Unix Shell Maintainer

Fri, 12 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

After an application and selection process, Ashwin Srinath has been selected as a new co-maintainer of the Unix Shell lesson, joining Gabriel Devenyi and replacing outgoing maintainer Christina Koch.

Introducing Ashwin

Ashwin is a Ph.D. candidate in Mechanical Engineering at Clemson University, and soon-to-be member of Clemson’s Cyberinfrastructure Technology Integration (CITI) research computing group. His research areas include computational fluid dynamics, and high-performance computing. He spends most days programming and making mistakes, and some days teaching others how not to make them. Ashwin has formerly served as co-maintainer for the Software Carpentry MATLAB materials.

A New Lesson on GAP

Tue, 09 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We are pleased to announce that [Alex Konovalov](http://blogs.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/alexk/) and his colleagues have created a Software Carpentry-style lesson on [the computational algebra system GAP](http://www.gap-system.org). The lesson is at [http://alex-konovalov.github.io/gap-lesson/](http://alex-konovalov.github.io/gap-lesson/), and the repository for it is at [https://github.com/alex-konovalov/gap-lesson](https://github.com/alex-konovalov/gap-lesson). It was taught at [a recent workshop](https://kkwakwa.github.io/2015-11-16-manchester-codima/), and feedback can be viewed [here](https://github.com/alex-konovalov/2015-11-16-manchester-codima-feedback/blob/master/raw-feedback.md).

We are now starting to develop a lesson on SageMath. We invite collaborators, please watch the repository if you’re interested in following along, and add a comment to this issue if you’re interested in contributing.

Presenting Materials for Intermediate UseRs

Mon, 18 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We’ve been teaching R workshops for over a year now at the University of Melbourne, and one thing we’ve noticed is the disparity in skill level among workshop attendees. Researchers generally fall into one of two catergories:

Absolute novices: those who have heard of R, but have never touched a programming language before.
Regular users: those who are using R in their research, possibly on a regular basis. They can modify scripts, and have a general understanding of the language basics, but want to extend their knowledge.

What Are Your Favorite Cartoons?

Mon, 18 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

As we're updating our lessons this year, I'd like to add a few more cartoons that relate directly to what we teach. Two of my favorites are [this description of how most scientists manage revisions](http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1531) and [this summary of how many people react to unwelcome evidence](http://www.felienne.com/archives/4404). What are yours, and what lessons would you add them to? Please add links in the comments on this page (and please make sure what you link to has enough information for us to contact artists and make sure we have permission to re-use their work).

Archiving Videos

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

People have been asking for videos of our lessons more and more frequently over the past few months, so we have begun archiving links on [the lessons page]({{site.baseurl}}/lessons/#video). If you have more, please send them our way (either as a pull request against the lessons page in [our website's GitHub repo](https://github.com/swcarpentry/website/blob/gh-pages/pages/lessons.html) or [by email](mailto:{{site.contact}}).

Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry on Podcast.init

Tue, 08 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

A couple of weeks ago I was interviewed by the Podcast.__init__ team to talk about Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry. The request for an interview actually came in a couple of months ago and I asked Greg Wilson about doing it, telling him I was a big fan of the podcast. He said he'd be happy to have me do it myself, giving me the chance to star in one of my favorite shows. I decided to do it, in pursuit of my goal of promoting Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry (and maybe more public exposure for myself).

Announcing Instructor Training Materials

Mon, 07 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We are pleased to announce that the lessons for our instructor training course are now available online and in this GitHub repository. They have evolved a lot in the three and a half years since we started running this class, and more improvements would be welcome: please file issues or send pull requests to fix, extend, or otherwise improve the material.

A New Lesson on Testing

Sun, 22 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Katy Huff has just posted a new lesson on testing and continuous integration with Python drawn in part from the book that she and Anthony Scopatz recently published. There's a lot of useful material in here, all of it tested in the classroom—please check it out.

CourseSource: A(nother) New Hope

Sun, 15 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I came across CourseSource a few weeks ago, and I'm pretty excited:

CourseSource is an open-access journal of peer-reviewed teaching resources for undergraduate biological sciences. We publish articles that are organized around courses in biological disciplines and aligned with learning goals established by professional societies representing those disciplines.

Python Lesson Rewrite

Sun, 15 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Recent analysis and introspection regarding Software Carpentry's Python lesson has led us to conclude that the lesson would benefit from a complete rewrite. The subcommittee on lesson development met twice to plan much about the new lessons (yes, that's plural). This post will describe our plans for the new lessons.

We're going to write two new Python lessons, one intended for students who are completely new to programming (the "novice" lesson), and another for students with some programming experience in any language (the "intermediate" lesson). Data Carpentry also targets new programmers so we'll be developing the new novice lesson in collaboration with DC, and both DC and SWC will use the lesson. We decided to use Gapminder data for both the novice and intermediate lessons in order to have a consistent experience and approachable, meaningful data (and because some lessons are already using it).

A Summary of Debriefing Feedback on Our Python Lesson

Thu, 08 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Last month, we discussed results from a survey of how our instructors are teaching Python. We now have a summary of the feedback we've received in our bi-weekly debriefing meetings. The recurring themes are:

A greater choice of exercises and multiple choice questions would allow instructors to select domain specific examples and cater to varying levels of learner.
Some instructors added an explanation of the Jupyter notebook or Spyder IDE environments.
Some instructors added an explanation of basic Python datatypes before presenting the lessons.
Comments that there is too much material to fit into a workshop and that some sections seem rushed.
Request for a better explanation of the advantages of the Anaconda Distribution at the start of workshops and resources for post workshop learning.
Comments on presenters style were positive for funny and entertaining examples and negative for highly mathematical examples.

A Case for Online Data Visualization

Fri, 02 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

This article originally appeared in The Research Bazaar.

Thorough data analysis is only one part of good research. Equally important is communicating the outcome well and accessibly. And visible research is accessible research.

Our main motivations for publishing our research results are:

making them openly accessible to the public,
informing fellow researchers about new outcomes that will help them in their research, and
strengthening our professional profiles.

Our Lessons Have Now Been Published

Sat, 05 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

It's been a long time coming, but we have finally published Version 5.3 of our core lessons. Please cite them as:

Feedback on Math with Python for Undergraduates

Fri, 21 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Ian Hawke (who put together these notebooks on testing numerical code) is now putting together some Jupyter Notebooks to teach Python to first-year undergraduates in mathematics. He would be grateful for feedback, and we'd be grateful if you could give him some: we'll learn a lot about what we should teach from seeing what you think he should.

Experiences Adding a Lesson on Make

Thu, 20 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

In June I added a lesson on Automation and Make. In this blog post, I describe how the lesson evolved, my experiences in porting it into the Software Carpentry lesson template, and the community's response...

Prepping for the Python Lesson

Sun, 16 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Inspired in part by Byron Smith's post about trimming our standard Python lesson, Christina Koch has written a post of her own about preparing to teach that lesson. She organizes her discussion around the motivating question that opens the lesson: "We have to accomplish a task (reading in data, analyzing and plotting it) by writing a program. How can we be smart about it?" It's a good read, as it shows how an experienced instructor thinks about (re-)designing teaching material. I hope her conclusions will feed into our discussion of how to revise the lesson (which we're going to decide in September).

Trimming the Python Lesson

Thu, 13 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We are close to releasing a new version of our standard Python lesson that uses Python 3 instead of Python 2. As soon as that's done, we're going to warm up this discussion about fixing that lesson. One new contribution to that is this post by Byron Smith about how he trimmed the existing lesson. If you have other experiences or comments, please add them to this GitHub issue so that we can make decisions in September about what to include in Version 5.4 in November.

Publishing, Metadata, and Being Ahead of the Curve

Wed, 12 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

As described in earlier posts, we are publishing our Version 5.3 lessons through Zenodo to make it easier for people to cite them. We're getting closer, but there are still a few bumps in front of us, and we would like our readers to help us figure out what to do next.

Solution for the Challenges

Tue, 28 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

One of the enhancement that we have in mind for the next release of our lessons is to provide the solution for the challenges. Having the solutions will help instructors speed up when preparing the lesson for workshops and learners reading the lessons. Before we start adding the solutions will be great to have one template for how it should be write. If you have some suggestions, please add it at this issue on GitHub.

Research-Based Course Design

Sun, 21 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I've written before about the breadth and depth of Juha Sorva's work on computing education. His latest contribution is a paper co-authored with Otto Seppälä titled "Research-Based Design of the First Weeks of CS1". In it, they tie the specifics of the new intro programming class at Aalto University directly back to CS education research. More specifically (from their abstract):

Adding a Lesson on Make

Thu, 18 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We are very pleased to announce the addition of a lesson on automation and Make, which was created by the SSI's Mike Jackson and Steve Crouch. The repository contains everything you need to teach it, and pull requests are very welcome.

Warming Up for Version 5.4

Fri, 12 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

It's time to start thinking about what should be in Version 5.4 of our lessons (which we plan to release in the middle of August to get us through to the end of the year). We have opened a discussion ticket for each of the core lessons on GitHub; please add your thoughts there.

An Update on Publishing Our Lessons

Sun, 07 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Just a quick update on publishing our lessons: we prepared the release on schedule, uploaded it to Zenodo, and then discovered that we couldn't actually specify editors through their web interface, only authors, even though "editor" is an allowed value in the metadata. We also couldn't specify "lesson" as a type: our choices were "publication" (which is pretty generic) or "presentation" (which isn't quite right). Figshare and COS wouldn't let us do this either, but Zenodo is now working on it. They hope to release it by the end of June, at which point we'll wrap this up.

Updating the Lesson Template

Sun, 07 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

A couple of weeks ago, we asked our lesson maintainers what changes they would like to see in our lesson template based on their experiences getting Version 5.3 ready for publication. Their comments are summarized below; it's an ambitious list, but I think we can do most or all of this between now and September. If there are other things you think we should change in the way we structure lessons (rather than in particular lessons themselves), please add comments, and if you'd like to dive into one of these, please checkout the current lesson-template issues and create a pull request against the lesson-template repository.

Working With Data on the Web

Mon, 01 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We have just added a new short lesson called Working With Data on the Web to our repertoire. If you would like to help us improve it, please fork it on GitHub and send us comments or pull requests.

Publishing Our Lessons

Fri, 17 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are one of the building blocks of academic bibliography systems. It's now possible to get a DOI for a GitHub repository (or more accurately, for the state of a GitHub repository at a particular point in time). We are going to use this to publish a citable version of our core lessons.

All I Want for Christmas is a Pull Request...

Thu, 18 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

As we said back in October, we're splitting the existing lesson repository into smaller and more manageable pieces. To do that, we have defined a new template for lessons, and have been extracting the history of the existing material from the current repository. (We wanted to get the entire history of each lesson so that people would receive credit for the work they've done.) The second step has taken longer than planned, but we now have all of the core novice lessons in repositories of their own:

Plans for 2015: Lessons

Wed, 03 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The previous three posts in this set looked at instructor training, workshop organization, and the twin challenges of mentorship and assessment. In this final one, I'll summarize the state of the changes we're making to our curriculum.

We described the new template for lessons back in October, and since then, a handful of people have been working to improve it and to extract our existing lessons from the 'bc' repository and convert them to the new format. The first step has taken longer than planned: we want to be sure we get the entire history of each lesson, so that people receive credit for the work they've done, and thats proving to be a slog.

The good news is, you can now see what the result will look like. Our novice lesson on SQL now lives in this repository, and you can view its rendered form in this GitHub pages site. There's still a lot to do—the learning objectives need to be cleaned up, the challenges all need meaningful names, and there's clearly lots of scope for improving the lesson's appearance—but the pieces are there.

Goalposts for the Digital Humanities

Mon, 01 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

As a follow-on to last month's post about courses at the British Library, I asked some people who are teaching digital humanists where their goalposts are, i.e., what they think the minimum someone in the humanities should know about working with computers and digital data. The brief responses were interesting:

Translating Software Carpentry into Korean

Tue, 25 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

This is pretty amazing: a group has translated the core Software Carpentry lessons into Korean:

Introduction: http://statkclee.github.io/xwmooc-sc/intro.html
The Unix Shell: http://statkclee.github.io/xwmooc-sc/novice/shell/
Version Control with Git: http://statkclee.github.io/xwmooc-sc/novice/git/
Programming with Python: http://statkclee.github.io/xwmooc-sc/novice/python/
Programming with R: http://statkclee.github.io/xwmooc-sc/novice/r/
Using Databases and SQL: http://statkclee.github.io/xwmooc-sc/novice/sql/
Extras: http://statkclee.github.io/xwmooc-sc/novice/extras/

It's a remarkable and encouraging achievement—congratulations and thanks to the team that did the work:

Victor KC Lee (이광춘): Translation Lead
Jungsu Han (한정수): Translator
Chungyeong Moon (문춘경): Illustrator
Ri Jeong Kim (김이정): Graphic Designer
Hwan Beom Kang (강환범): Support

We still need to figure out how to manage this: Gabriel Devenyi's post outlined our options, but someone will need to take the lead to set something up so that versions in various languages can stay in sync.

Presenting the Novice R Materials and Future Plans for the SWC R Community

Mon, 20 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Approximately seven months after our initial meeting, the SWC R community has developed the first set of R lessons for use both in workshops and for self-directed learning from the SWC website. These novice R lessons are a translation of the current novice Python lessons.

Release 2013.11

Tue, 10 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We are pleased to announce the release of v2013.11 of our lesson materials. This release represents nearly 2 years of collaborative lesson development from 54 contributors, and features lessons for using the Unix shell to automate repetitive tasks, modular programming in Python and R, personal and collaborative version control with Git, unit testing, and working with databases. Contributors include: