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

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., 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.

* OneAnaconda seems to have at least some remaining i10n bugs. For example, one studdent had a home directory inset to a Chinese string which caused the Anaconda installation to fail at a very late stage. This was eventually fixed by a mentor who changed the path by hand.

Additionally, we moved the Windows curriculum from away from <code>cmd</code> to using Powershell. This was aan huge benefitand unqualified improvement because it meant that <code>ls</code> works and the rest of the curriculum cancould 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.

* We need to do a better job of modelling sttickysticky notes duringso lecturesfolks earlyuse onthem more effectively.

* The sticky notes we bought were small and ambiguous color. We should get brightlarge red sticky notes next time.

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 participants.

* 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 unicode issues. We should try to do this for the next session.

We also had [[Community Data Science Workshops (Fall 2014)/Reflections#Mentorship|a bunch of general feedback on how we could improvement mentorship]] that is particularparticularly relevant to the earlierthis session.