University College London on The Carpentries

Workshop for High-Energy Physics at UCL, Part 2

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Three months after part 1, the second half of the UCL Software Carpentry workshop for High-Energy Physics took place on Friday 15th February 2013.

The experimental format with two sessions three months apart might have worked better if, as envisaged, we had managed to get an online discussion going in the gap. Unfortunately this did not work out. Despite several attempts at chasing up the participants, no-one registered or posted anything on the course web site. After talking to some of the students, I think their interest was just not great enough to overcome the bureaucracy involved in registering on the UCL Moodle server and the tendency to focus on their other (assessed) courses and research projects. Attendance was down from 65% to 30% (6 of 20 students), although those who did attend were clearly motivated, worked hard and asked thoughtful questions. With two helpers (James Hetherington and HEP postgrad Sam Cook) and myself as instructor, we had a student:staff ratio of 2:1.

Workshop for High-Energy Physics at UCL

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

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Following the success of the open bootcamp at UCL in April/May this year, we decided to have a go at introducing some Software Carpentry to the first-year postgraduate students in my own research group, High-Energy Physics (HEP). There is already a longstanding University of London intercollegiate lecture programme for these students, including some programming in C++ and Python. The new workshops aim to help participants consolidate and extend their existing Python knowledge, as well as learning about more general best practice in software development, by following an extended worked example using version control and test-driven development.

UCL Bootcamp: Version Control Wrap-Up

Fri, 04 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

For the bootcamp at UCL, we tried using Mercurial (with EasyMercurial) instead of Subversion in the version control segment.

You can see the plan for the segment on this EasyMercurial project page. Briefly, we opened with a few plain slides about the purpose of version control, followed by a hands-on example in three parts (working by yourself, working by yourself with an online remote repository, and working with others). We started at the beginning and got as far as "hg bisect", but did not cover branching.

The Good and the Bad of It

Wed, 02 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We've come to the end of a hot, slightly sweaty, two days of learning in UCL and have just done a straw poll of participants of the good and bad points of this bootcamp. Something that was trialled at UCL was asking participants to sign up in small (3-4 people) teams drawn from their local research group. In total, we had a little over 40 learners and 10 helpers. We also taught the version control portion using EasyMercurial (thanks to Chris Cannam from SoundSoftware).

Better Across the Pond?

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I'm sitting in a packed room helping out at the UCL bootcamp, the first of a series to be run in the United Kingdom (Newcastle is next, and there are plans to run additional workshops in Oxford, RAL, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Bristol). I'm thinking about two things: why would you design a 60 seater lecture theatre with only one window for ventilation and why is Software Carpentry so popular in the UK?