Software Carpentry Workshop (R-focused) in January

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Easton White

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Oct 6, 2017, 2:31:26 PM10/6/17
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Hi folks,

I wanted to let everyone know I plan on organizing a Software Carpentry (https://software-carpentry.org/) workshop on campus around January 3rd-5th. I wanted to put the date out there to avoid dueling workshops at the same time. The workshop will be two parts R, one part shell, and one part Git.

As we get closer to the date, I will send out a message if you are interested in helping. Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts.

Best,
Easton White

Jason Moore

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Oct 31, 2017, 11:39:38 AM10/31/17
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I'm hosting this on Jan 5th, which may attract similar groups.

To share the efforts of this work with the entire university we plan to invite Olin College Prof. Allen Downey, author of ThinkPython, ThinkDSP, and other similar titles, to give both a seminar and a workshop on these methods. Prof. Downey is an international leader in educating undergraduates with computational thinking. He is supported by Olin’s Collaboratory which is “dedicated to co-designing transformational educational experiences with and for other institutions”. The one hour seminar will accommodate up to 75 participants and the half day workshop will accommodate up to 40 participants. An outline of the each of his proposed activities is presented below:


Seminar: Programming as a Way of Thinking


Programming is not just a way to translate well-known solutions into code; it is a way to explore, discover solutions, and then create the language to express them.  Programming is a meta-skill that helps people learn other skills and understand new ideas by expressing them in code.  When programmers debug code that represents their understanding, they are debugging their brains at the same time.  Modern programming languages like Python allow programmers to think in code, and think differently as a result.


In this talk I present examples where Python is used as a thinking tool, a way to understand abstract ideas by expressing them in code.  I start with basic examples that demonstrate the expressive power of Python, and move on to recent projects that prompted me to reflect on Python as a way of thinking. I draw examples from statistics, mechanics, and digital signal processing.


Workshop: Computational Thinking in the Engineering Curriculum


This workshop invites faculty to think about computation in the context of engineering education, and to design classroom experiences that develop programming skills and apply them to engineering topics.  Starting from examples in signal processing and mechanics, participants will identify topics that might benefit from a computational approach and design course materials to deploy in their classes.


Although our examples come from engineering, this workshop might also be of interest to faculty the natural and social sciences as well as mathematics.


Jason

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Check out our R resources at http://d-rug.github.io/
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