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Over three weekends in Fall 2014, a group of volunteers organized the [[Community Data Science Workshops (Fall 2014)]]
This page hosts reflections on organization and curriculum and is written for anybody interested in organizing their own CDSW — including the authors!
In general, the mentors and students suggested that the workshops were a huge success. Students suggested that learned an enormous amount and benefited enormously. Mentors were also generally very excited about running similar projects in the future. That said, we all felt there were many ways to improve on the sessions which
If you have any questions or issues, you can contact [[Benjamin Mako Hill]] directly or can email the whole group of mentors at cdsw-au2014-mentors@uw.edu.
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* '''Session 3 (Saturday November 22nd)''': [[Community Data Science Workshops (Fall 2014)# Session 3|Data analysis and visualization]]
Our organization and the curriculum for Sessions 0 and 1 were originally borrowed from the [http://bostonpythonworkshop.com/ Boston Python Workshop] (BPW) although the particular curriculum has diverged quite a bit
Session 0 was a three hour evening session to install software. All three of the other sessions were all day-long session (10am to 4pm) sessions broken up into the following schedule:
* '''Morning, 10am-12:20''': A 2 hour lecture
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* [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1RJTTwXe2O_C1ZAtMgWRLGXVc-tRpY76NbvorLg644MQ/viewform After Session 2]
* [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1-BngUwkEmephM2xLl3Ews2LnopF3sI7hlgYhQK4YJL4/viewform After Session 3]
* [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1v2gNpPSY3gjJ9G_PZgmjt2YZTBz6XxA6-lLUzDKWfMg/viewform After Session 3 (Unretained)] — Unsurprisingly, perhaps, not a single person filled this out so we
We used this feedback to both evaluate what worked well and what did not and to get a sense of what students wanted to learn in the next session and which afternoon sessions they might find interesting.
==
We had 30 mentors who attended at least one of the sessions and at least 20 mentors at each sessions. Many of
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.
Retention between session and 0 and 1 was nearly 100%. Retention between sessions 1 and 2 and sessions 2 and 3 was
Anecdotally, there is a sense that those who are dropping are those who had more trouble but didn’t struggle visibly.
Although our participant pool in [[CDSW (Spring 2014)]] was overwhelming female, there was close to gender balance in both students and mentors. Roughly 2/3 of mentees were from UW and this included students from random places including someone who works for the city of Seattle. Many random Wikipedians were there. It's cool that people who are not doing research but are part of online communities were in the mix with the researchers. ▼
▲Although our participant pool in [[CDSW (Spring 2014)]] was overwhelming female, there was close to gender balance in both students and mentors. Roughly 2/3 of mentees were from UW and this included students from random places including someone who works for the city of Seattle. Many random Wikipedians were there.
Once again, the constraint on scaling the workshop is the number of mentors. Every mentor means that the workshop can accommodate four more mentees.
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== Morning Lectures ==
[[User:Mako|Mako]] gave lectures in Session 1 and 3. Frances Hocutt gave
Our biggest challenge with
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.
== Session 0: Python Setup ==▼
The goal of this session was to get users setup with Python and starting to learn some of the basics. We changed the curriculum 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., respondants reported either "no problems" or a "few problems.")▼
Anaconda was key to smoothyness compared to the first workshop series and addressed most of our setup and path issues. That said, we had several major concerns:▼
* Anaconda is not free software or open source▼
* Anaconda does not support Python 3 which we'd like to move to▼
* One studdent had a home directory in Chinese which caused the Anaconda installation to fail at a very late stage. This was eventually fixed by a mentor who changed the path. ▼
Additionally, we moved the Windows curriculum from away from <code>cmd</code> to using Powershell. This was a huge benefit because it meant that <code>ls</code> works and the rest of the curriculum can converge. The only concerns were:▼
* Powershell is not installed on Windows XP although ''not a single student had Windows XP''▼
Changes for next time include:▼
* Because it was less successful, we can deemphasize recruiting mentors to the Friday night session.▼
* Because Powershell was successful, we're going to try to create a single consolidated set of installation instructions for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux!▼
* We will make it 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. In future, email mentors ahead of time to let them know. ▼
* We need to do a better job of modelling stticky notes during lectures early on. ▼
* The sticky notes we bought were small and ambiguous color. We should get bright red sticky notes next time.▼
* Set up/arrange/select the space to facilitate better circulation of mentors. ▼
When mentors can circulate easily things are better for mentees. ▼
* We are going to try writing installation instructions that do not rely on Anaconda so people have a fully open source option.▼
* Once again, not a single person outside of mentors ran GNU/Linux. We should strongly consider how much effort we want to put into maintaining this part of the curriculum.▼
* We should move to Python 3 to try to address lingering unicode issues. We should try to do this for the next session.▼
* Not everybody loves the checkout step. Maybe there's a way we can make it more fun?▼
We also had [[Community Data Science Workshops (Fall 2014)/Reflections#Mentorship|a bunch of general feedback on how we could improvement mentorship]] that is particular relevant to the earlier session▼
== Afternoon Sessions ==
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talk to chris to try to fix those things
▲== Session 0: Python Setup ==
▲The goal of this session was to get users setup with Python and starting to learn some of the basics. We changed the curriculum 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., respondants reported either "no problems" or a "few problems.")
▲Anaconda was key to smoothyness compared to the first workshop series and addressed most of our setup and path issues. That said, we had several major concerns:
▲* Anaconda is not free software or open source
▲* Anaconda does not support Python 3 which we'd like to move to
▲* One studdent had a home directory in Chinese which caused the Anaconda installation to fail at a very late stage. This was eventually fixed by a mentor who changed the path.
▲Additionally, we moved the Windows curriculum from away from <code>cmd</code> to using Powershell. This was a huge benefit because it meant that <code>ls</code> works and the rest of the curriculum can converge. The only concerns were:
▲* Powershell is not installed on Windows XP although ''not a single student had Windows XP''
▲Changes for next time include:
▲* Because it was less successful, we can deemphasize recruiting mentors to the Friday night session.
▲* Because Powershell was successful, we're going to try to create a single consolidated set of installation instructions for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux!
▲* We will make it 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. In future, email mentors ahead of time to let them know.
▲* We need to do a better job of modelling stticky notes during lectures early on.
▲* The sticky notes we bought were small and ambiguous color. We should get bright red sticky notes next time.
▲* Set up/arrange/select the space to facilitate better circulation of mentors.
▲When mentors can circulate easily things are better for mentees.
▲* We are going to try writing installation instructions that do not rely on Anaconda so people have a fully open source option.
▲* Once again, not a single person outside of mentors ran GNU/Linux. We should strongly consider how much effort we want to put into maintaining this part of the curriculum.
▲* We should move to Python 3 to try to address lingering unicode issues. We should try to do this for the next session.
▲* Not everybody loves the checkout step. Maybe there's a way we can make it more fun?
▲We also had [[Community Data Science Workshops (Fall 2014)/Reflections#Mentorship|a bunch of general feedback on how we could improvement mentorship]] that is particular relevant to the earlier session
== Session 1: Introduction to Python ==
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