I just finished my third workshop in two weeks. I taught 3.5 days of microbial bioinformatics at Caltech, 2 days of intro computing for biologists at MSU, and another 2-day intro computing for biologists workshop at UW. The Caltech workshop was sponsored by CEMI, the Caltech Environmental Microbial Initiative …
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We all know that biology (along with other sciences) is becoming ever more data intensive. Biologists (among other scientists) are not terribly well prepared for this, because of a lack of computational culture, lack of computational training, and a lack of tools. What do they need to know?
This question …
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Software installation is a real problem.
I'm writing this as I return from my fourth Software Carpentry workshop, or -- if you count the one I ran at LLNL almost a decade ago -- my fifth one. This workshop was taught with Karen Cranston and Rich Enbody, both of them very experienced …
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Julia Gustavsen and I just finished teaching one room of a 3-room Software Carpentry boot camp at University of Washington, Seattle.
Students remained interested and vocal, even when looking exhausted.
Almost all came back the second day!
We got some good individual feedback that we'd taught useful things …
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One of the things that I have struggled with over the years is how to teach people how to actually program -- by this I mean the minute-to-minute process and techniques of generating code, more so than syntax and data structures and algorithms. This is generally not taught explicitly in college …
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I am just returning from a trip to Southern California that included, among other things, the teaching of a two day Software Carpentry workshop at The Scripps Research Institute. There were two instructors, myself and Tracy Teal, a research scientist at MSU; and two external TAs, Qingpeng Zhang (one of …
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