What’s happening this week

Several workshops are looking for instructors and helpers for the summertime, for example, one at Cornell University in June, and another at the University of Cambridge at the end of May. Take a look at the bottom of this post and spend a weekend teaching and making new friends.

Workshops

Lex Nederbragt, Karin Lagesen, and David Fredman taught a R-based workshop at the University of Bergen in Sweden.

Upcoming workshops

• April 29: George Washington University, Ashburn, VA,
• May 12: Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbour, NY,
• May 12: Universidade Federal do Rio Grande, Rio Grande, Brazil.
• May 19: Science for Life Laboratory, Solna, Sweden.
• June 2-4: Monash University, Australia.
• June 4-6: Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics, Pisa, Italy.

Lesson development

3 pull requests were merged, 3 issues were closed, and 3 issues were opened. In addition to the merges, we had 55 commits made by Jessica Hamrick, Leyder, Brendan Taylor, Daniel Chen, John Blischak, Likit Preeyanon, Raniere Silva, Greg Wilson, Andrea Zonca, Gavin Simpson, Aron Ahmadia, Breena O’Brien, and Dani Traphagen.

Other news

• Raniere Silva discussed on our blog a couple of tools that can help beginners to write mathematical expressions in a computer.
• Greg Wilson talked on the blog about how the concepts of API and XPI can be applied to the development of teaching material. He thinks that collaborative lesson development would need a way to track dependencies or the project won’t scale.
• Greg Wilson initiated a conversation on the blog about how sometimes is still hard to teach end-user tasks, like data analysis, without teaching first more basic concepts.
• Did you miss our lab meeting last week? There is a nice recap on the blog.
• All of the PyCon 2014 videos are online. You can find a compilation of the talks given by people associated to Software Carpentry in this post.

A workshop needs you

• US and Canada
  • A workshop in San Diego in May needs instructors and helpers, and a lot of instructors are needed in the West Coast: two at the University of California at Davis, four in total for two workshops in Stanford. In the East Coast, a workshop at the University of Delaware needs instructors, and also in Atlanta in Georgia, and Cornell University.
• Europe
  • At least one instructor is needed for a workshop in Kiel, Germany, and several for workshops in Cranfield, Nottingham, Cambridge and Oxford in the UK.

More details in the instructor-needed Etherpad.