University of Oslo on The Carpentries

Carpentry week 2016 at the University of Oslo

Tue, 12 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Cross-posted from the author’s blog.

In March 14-18 2016 we organised the first Carpentry week at the University of Oslo. After a mini-Seminar on Open Data Skills, there was a Software Carpentry workshop, two Data Carpentry workshops and a workshop on Reproducible Science as well as a ‘beta’ Library Carpentry workshop.

The Software and Data Carpentry effort at the University of Oslo, aka ‘Carpentry@UiO’, really started in 2012 when I invited Software Carpentry to give a workshop at the university. The then director, Greg Wilson, came himself and gave an inspirational workshop – recruiting Karin Lagesen and I to become workshop instructors in the process. Karin and I graduated from instructor training spring 2013 and have been giving a couple of workshops in Oslo and elsewhere.

The Oslo Bootcamp

Wed, 10 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Karin Lagesen writes:

The bootcamp took place at the University Library at the main campus of the University of Oslo. We had set a limit at 40 people, and we had a total of 32 attendees signing up. Sign-up was in the beginning quite slow, and we were actually at one time wondering whether we would have to cancel the event. But, as we got into June sign-ups picked up. We had decided to ask people to pay $20 to sign up (which was subsequently converted into coffee) and this might have caused people to not sign up until they were sure they could join. We ended up with 27 actual attendees the first day and 25 on the second day. The attendees were for the most part related to biology in some way—not strange considering we had advertised it in connection with the Galaxy 2013 community conference and on several bioinformatics related email lists. Also, most of them were either doing their PhDs or working on a post-doc. Both Lex and I feared lots of issues with installation, but even though the pre-bootcamp survey showed that almost half of the attendees were bringing Windows laptops things went surprisingly smoothly.

Oslo and Columbia

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Here's some feedback from participants in our Oslo workshop:

Good

Discovered a dishwasher
Test-driven development
Lots of anecdotes
Power plugs and coffee!
Jokes (no, really)
Reminded me why I should use version control
Inspirational
Discovering the web page
Not slaughtered by Vikings (yet)
Good teaching skills
Free!

Bad

Lunch at twelve, please
Didn't cover SQL
Need to show code and output side by side
Couldn't keep up with typing
Greg speaks too fast
Not good context for some examples
Matrix programming lacked exercises and examples
More exercises please
34 registered, 15 attended
Tell us more about installation
Lack of key point summaries
Too short

And from our Columbia University workshop in New York City (see also this great writeup from the course instructor, Dr. Rachel Schutt):