memex

Olga Botvinnik's bioinformatics musings (among other things). She has a great post on teaching coding to biologists, which links to the Software Carpentry's page here. It's basically all of Mehta's stuff, customized for coding, and Botvinnik's post has the feedback she got from students with some nice reflections.

Cool ideas include: pair up, and the more experienced student is not allowed to type; use pink and blue post-its to indicate whether a pair is still working or ready to advance (pink = still working). She had some of the same issues I had with different OS in the audience (even at CCLCM!). It's honestly the biggest barrier to starting up. Maybe CoLab and the like, but we're trying to make capable researchers, so… Maybe whoever sets up the Surfaces could just install miniconda and add it to the PATH! That would probably take care of a lot of the issues.

Another gem from Olga Botvinnik, using Tufte's ideas in MPL.

Sun 17 Nov 2019 10:23:05 AM CST