Community Data Science Workshops (Fall 2014)/Reflections: Difference between revisions

Our organization and the curriculum for Sessions 0 and 1 were originally borrowed from the [http://bostonpythonworkshop.com/ Boston Python Workshop] (BPW) although the particularour curriculum has diverged quite a bit as we've improved it and tailored it to the specific learning goals in our sessions.

We had 30 mentors who attended at least one of the sessions and at least 20 mentors at each sessions. Many of our mentors were UW students in more technical departments like [https://www.cs.washington.edu/ Computer Science and Engineering] and [https://www.hcde.washington.edu Human Centered Design and& Engineering]. MostPerhaps half of them worked outside of the wereuniversity fullas timesoftware programmersdevelopers.

We had about 150 participants apply to attend the sessions. We selected on programming skill (to ensure that all attendees were complete beginners), enthusiasm, and randomly to maintain a learner to mentor ratio of between 4 and 5. We admitted 80 participants. 58 listed a UW affiliations. Affiliations listed by at least three people include the following:

AlthoughWe ouralso participanthad poolpeople infrom [[CDSWPsychology, (Springthe 2014)]]City wasof overwhelming femaleSeattle, therethe wasLow closeIncome toHousing genderProject, balanceSeattle inMeshnet, bothBiochemical studentsEngineering, andBio mentors.Physical, RoughlyChemical 2/3Engineering, ofGame menteesStudies, wereLinguistic, fromCollege UWof andthe thisEnvironment, includedOceanography, studentsthe fromSchool randomand placesPublic includingHealth, someoneUW whoBothell, worksCentral forWashington theUniversity, cityand ofmany Seattle.people Manywho randomdid Wikipediansnot werespecify an thereaffiliation. We continue to think that it's coolimportant that people who are not doing research but who are are part of online communities were in the mix with theUW-type researchers. Bringing together researchers and participants in online communities is an important goal and would like to work toward more balance in this regard and to increase the amount of non-UW participation.

Once again, the constraint on scaling the workshop iswas the number of mentors. Every mentor we added means that the workshop can accommodate four more menteesparticipants.

One suggestion was allowing menteesparticipants with have some programming skills — especially for the second and third workshops (given predictable rates of retention). There was not consensus among the organizers and mentors on this approach and preferred getting more newbies and invest more in them?

[[User:Mako|Benjamin Mako Hill]] gave lectures in Session 1 and 3. Frances Hocutt gave the lecture in Session 2 and, generally,we felt that this was seen aswas an important successstep. An important future goal is getting other people to more of thegive lectures. Tommy is an obvious choice to do one next time. Different faces, perspective, and backgrounds are useful to communicate the breadth of interest here. [[User:Mako|Mako]] does not want to be the only one giving these lectures.

Our biggest challenge with growing the workshops was with physical space for the lectures. Basically, rooms thathat can hold more than 100 people at UW are almost exclusively lectures halls that make it almost impossible for mentors to physically reach students in order to help them debug and solve problems.

We reserved a lecture hall that fit 200 people and filled it with 100 students in alternating rows to make it at least possible to reach each person. ProjectsThis areworked donereasonably inwell breakoutalthough sessionsit whichwas canstill be splitsuboptimal.

People continue to want a record of lectures. At the very minimum, we should make sure that we turn on console logging so that we can post this after the lectures. We intended to record lectures but, once again, this got lost in all the crazy preparation for the events.

The goal of this session was to get users setup with Python and starting to learn some of thePython basics. We changed the curriculum originally used by BPW enormously to use Continuum's Anaconda instead of Python directly from [http://python.org python.org]. The result was staggering. Not a ''single person'' reported "many problems with set-up" (i.e., respondantsrespondents reported either "no problems" or a "few problems.")

*Additionally, we moved the Windows curriculum from away from <code>cmd</code> to using Powershell. This was an huge and unqualified improvement because it meant that <code>ls</code> works and the rest of the curriculum could converge. The only concerns were that Powershell is not installed on Windows XP although ''not a single student had Windows XP''.

* Because it was less successfulnecessary, we canwill deemphasize recruiting mentors to the Friday night session. Many folks were standing around.

* Because Powershell was successful, we're going to try to create a single consolidated set of installation instructions for Windows, Mac OSX, and GNU/Linux!

* We will make it more clear to mentors whether participants should self-report they’d completed the steps or whether the mentor should verify that the steps were all taken (the latter). In future, we will email mentors ahead of time to let them know.

When* We should set up/arrange/select space to facilitate better circulation of mentors. Generally, we found that when mentors can circulate easily things are better for menteesparticipants.

* We are going to try writing additional installation instructions that do not rely on Anaconda so people have a fully open source option.

* Once again, not a single person outside of mentorsthe mentor group ran GNU/Linux. We should strongly consider how much effort we want to put into maintaining this part of the curriculum which, to date, has never been used.

* We shouldwant moveto seriously investigate the possibility of moving to Python 3 to try to address lingering unicodeUnicode issues. We should try to do this for the next session.

TheThat goal of this session was to teach the basic of programming in Python. The basic curriculum was originally built off the [[Boston Python Workshop]] curriculum has been used many times and is well tested. Unsurprisinglysaid, it worked well for us as well. Wewe made several major changes this time around. The biggest is that we retained only the [[Wordplay]] project. andWe wealso installedcreated createaa new project, [[Baby Names]], that uses Social Security Administration data on the frequency of Baby Names.

We felt that that the new [[Baby Names]] project was excellent and feedback was overwhelmingoverwhelmingly positive. Because it includes both dictionaries and lists of names and(in the form of <code>.keys()</code> numbersmethods), it can do everything that [[Wordplay]] can but it has a much stronger feel of data science to it and, generally, a higher ceiling. Wordplay felt relatively boring.

* Do a better job of briningbringing folks back to gethertogether to walk through potential solutions to the questions posed in the project rooms.

* Consider simply having two smaller rooms doing [[Baby Names]] and perhaps havehaving one that emphasizes more numeric and math operations.

The [[Community Data Science Workshops (Fall 2014)/Day 2 lecture|morning lecture]] was given by Frances Hocutt and it was was well received — if delivered too slowly for a significant minority of attendees. Unsurprisingly, the example of [http://placekitten.com/ PlaceKitten] as an API was an enormous hit: informative ''and'' cute.

Frances used excellent slides which are shared [[Community Data Science Workshops (Fall 2014)/Day 2 lecture|on the wiki page]] and which we will reuse. About half found Frances’sthe lecture either too fast or too slow and about half found the lecture to be just right.

Since many people felt the lecture was on the slower side, we want to use this time to introduce function definitiondefinitions. upWe front.will Then,also functionsdevote cana bebit reinforcedless intime to review which, because of the one week 2spacing between sessions, feels less important than it did last workshopstime.

There were three parallel afternoon sessions on '''Twitter''', '''Wikipedia API''' and '''SQL'''. WeAll three were successful and we plan to do some version of all three sessions next round:

* Once again, the session had too many people for the room and we should consider splitting it if we have mentors who are comfortable splittingteaching it and we should try to arrange this ahead of time.

* Next time, weWe should be careful to make sure that the advance notice asks everybody to download the project zip file ahead of time. If we're going to do this in class instead, we should set up a short URL of some sort to help streamline the process without headingforcing everybody to head to the wiki for things.

* A bunch of people found the Twitter session too fast. so we should try to slow this down.

* GraduatedWe challengesshould inconsider agraduated workhshopchallenges that go from less challenging to more and more challenging helpswhich might help with the fact there is a range of learning levels.

An '''Theanalysis with spreadsheets session.''' Peoplesimilar to what we taught last time. This was improved and more effective. By the end, many participants were modifying the code to build their own datasetdatasets and diddoing their own visualizations. AtOne leaststudent built a fewtime peopleseries of edits to articles about death by police and another to articles about the NFL. ThatIn wasboth cool!cases, real patterns driven by current events became clearly visible.

'''TheWe MatPlotLibalso ran a session on '''matplotlib''' which was taught by two mentors we brought in specifically to teach it but who had limited experience with the CDSW. MostSome people in the session were deeply lost. TheBecause the mentors who taught it were not at any of the other sessions, andthey therefore didn’t go in with a good sense of where the menteesparticipants were at. Several people left and went toIn other room. Inthe future, ensure mentor success by havingwe themshould loop in teachers better to where the menteesparticipants are at. Consider nextFor timeexample, encouragingwe newmight encourage new mentors do a practice session with some friendly folks before they let loose. Also, next session, consider using SeaBorn instead of MatPlotLib.

* Generally, there was a sense that we should stop creating pages in the wikwiki by copying and pasting old stuff. This was the BPW model but it's leading to madness. We when archive thean old version of a site, we can use MediaWiki to create links to the old version of the pages (we can intstallinstall templates from English Wikipedia) to help make this easier).

* We should try to schedule the workshop not asquite so close to the end of the quarter. The beginning or middle of the quarter should be better for UW students.

* Mentors should post the code generated in the break-outsout sessions. Encourage them to capture the code created in examples and to post these afterward systematically.

* There was general interest in pair programming or more team based excercisesexercised. We should consider changes along this line.

Last time through, most of our observation were focused on improving the experience of attendees and we think we didn't spend as much time on helping mentors have a great experience and helping them prepare effectively. We had many new mentors this round. One general concern was the relative lack of mentor training, especially before the first sessions. We had a series of pieces of feedback on how to improve this.

* Arrange a pre-CDSW mentors meeting (perhaps a day or two before to over material) and maybe at a bar or other social environment with beer and pizza. We coudlcould use this tnormsto set norms, best practices, goals, planning, etc.

* Perhaps meet 15-20 minutes early before Session 0 to get to know each other and over things.

* Send out detailsdetailed instructions and emails to mentors, or create pages in this wiki, withthat detail ongood howmentoring. toFor do this better.example:

** Talk to mentors aboutHow much should you help? (eSome.g., some butBut be careful not to just give away the answer, to focus too much on elegance or technical correctness. and beBe careful not to overwhelm the learners).

WeOnce again, we had certain afternoon project sessions that were much more effective than others. One thing we were conflitedconflicted about was whether we wanted more break-out sessions or whether we should just use the best of the break-out sessions (perhaps in two rooms).

* PrecannedPre-canned sessions make it easier for new mentors to feel confident and be successful.

Some observations about the culture of mentoring from a first time mentor: There are some distinct values that came through strongly. There is a clear vision of empowerment through programming. The degree of inclusivity is impressive. The culture of feedback, iteration, and reflection was really surprising such as the amount of effort that goes into improving the materials and the teaching. As is the way that other organizations are able to (and are) using the materials. The way that this is building the community. For example, how menteesparticipants are organizing their own meet-ups (though that could be encouraged even more).

The pragmatism of what is taught demonstrates a clear value. It would be helpful to make sure that all mentors are clear that part of what is expected of them they give pragmatic coaching. That is they should lead menteesparticipants to something that works rather than telling them what an expert would do.