The first time I heard about The Carpentries was sometime in 2022. But before I introduce The Carpentries, I want to first briefly talk about NeuroHackaademy, a summer school I attended virtually that same year.I learned a range of foundational data and software skills for doing research using neuroimaging data, i.e., Git, GitHub, Docker, DataLad, I was eager for more workshop content like that, and soon discovered The Carpentries workshops offered by UCSD.
I was new to using the command line at that point, it took a while to get used to not using GUIs. When I did the Unix workshop offered by UCSD’s Carpentries, a lot of things finally clicked; I could finally not blindly run scripts shared by my labmates, but actually understand each component in the script. It gave me a foundation to start writing more complex bash scripts. Over time, I found myself repeatedly returning to the materials on my own. Eventually I was able to do informal demo session for others, I thought: why not take a step further to get certified?
Live coding in front of an audience was still intimidating to me nonetheless, but it became challenge I wanted to overcome. I knew the Carpentries instructor training process would help me become more confident and effective in doing technical demos, so I took the plunge earlier this year!
The training and certification process was pretty straightforward:
- Instructor Training
- I participated in a two-day interactive workshop focused on evidence-based teaching methods. I really enjoyed seeing how principles I’m familiar with from cognitive sciences about information processing and cognitve load get translated into practical advice for teaching, more specifically how to implement them in the virtual setting when delivering online workshops.
- Teaching Demonstration
- During the demo, we were asked to deliver a short live coding lesson; we gave and received feedback from a trainer and other trainees who were completing the assessment too. I enjoyed seeing the diversity of topics that other trainees presented during the demo -e.g., intermediate R and OpenRefine, a data cleaning and wrangling tool. The demo was 5-min long, and I did mine on Unix shell.
- Other Checkout Requirements
- Contributing to a lesson repository, participating in a community call, or serving as an instructor or helper at a workshop are among the options available to trainees to complete the Carpentries checkout process. I attended my first community call as a result of this, in which the topic of discussion was teaching Carpentries workshops in the age of AI. In the meeting we explored how to support students in developing foundational coding skills while acknowledging the prevalence of AI tools, and how to integrate these tools effectively into teaching while mitigating students developing overdepedence on such tools, especially early on during the learning process.
I did not know this then, but over time I noticed that people and organizations whose work that I gravitate towards happen to have present or past affiliations with The Carpentries:
- The Turing Way’s chapters and Carpentries practices are heavily impleneted together in a Data Science for Biomedical Scientist training project funded by the UK gov.
- Tommy Tang's 2018 ChIPseq workshop
- Digital Life Norway, a national centre for biotechnology research, education and innovation that facilitates interdisciplinary research across institutions, which I came to learn about via Nucleate Norway, also offered Carpentries workshops
The process took me ~1 month!
