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

== General Feedback ==

Our goal was get learners as close to independence as possible but we felt that most learners didn't make it all the way. In a sense, our our final session seemed to let out a little bit on a low point int he class in the sense that many user had learned enough that they were able to work but not enough that they were not struggling enormously in the process.

One suggestion is to add an additionial optional session with no lecture or planned projects. Learners could come and mentors will be with them to work on ''their'' projects. Of course, we want everybody to be able to come so we should also create a set of "random" projects for folks that don't have them.

* The spacing between sessions too much. In part, this was due to the fact that we were creating curriculum as we went. Next time, we will try to do the sessions every other week (e.g., 3 sesions in 5 weeks).

* The breaks for lunch were a bit too long. We took 1 hours breaks but 45 minutes would have been enough for everybody. Learners were interested in getting back in action.

* The general structure of the entire curriculum was not as clear as it might have been. This was at least in part because the details of what we would teach int he later sesions were not done but it led to questions. In the future, we should present this clearly up front.

* We did not have enough mentors with experience using Python in Windows. We had many skilled GNU/Linux users and ''zero'' students running GNU/Linux. Most of the mentors used Mac OSX and most of the learners ran Windows.

* Although we did not use it as a recruitment or selection criteria, a majority of the participants in the session were women. Although we had a mix, the fact that most of our mentors were male and most of he mentors were female set up a strange dynamic. If we expect to have a similar ratio in the future, we should recruit female mentors and, in particular, attract women to lead the afternoon sessions (all of the afternoon session leaders were male).

* The SWC-style sticky notes worked extremely well but were used less and seemed to have less value as we went along.

We might also want to spend time devoting more time explicitly to teaching:

* Debugging code

* Finding and reading documentation

* Troubleshooting and looking at StackExchange for answers to programming questions.

=== Budget ===