About

This training is part of the NSF-funded project “Building Capacity in Data Science through Biodiversity, Conservation, and General Education” (Awards 2122967 and 2122991). The goals of the grant are really two-fold:

  1. Provide accessible data science skills training to undergraduate students, with an emphasis, but not restriction, to STEM fields.
  2. Provide professional development opportunities to instructors of those undergraduate students, so they can feel empowered to teach data science applications in their classrooms.

The lessons presented here address point #2 above.

The Carpentries is a non-profit organization that teaches foundational coding and data science skills to researchers worldwide. These are most often advertised as Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry, and Library Carpentry workshops. The organization has a curriculum for training the folks who instruct in those workshops, and much of the material in the pedagogy session comes from that instructor training curriculum.

How to use this material

These materials are intended to be taught over a series of sessions, each lasting around two hours, with time for a break at the hour (one exception: the first session includes the “Introductions” session, as well as “Building Skill with Practice”). Lessons are led by an instructor and, wherever possible, emphasize interaction and participation. The materials, largely adapted from The Carpentries training curriculum, are primarily designed for online, synchronous delivery, although we have had some success delivering them in hybrid mode. Many of the activities rely on participants adding content to a “collaborative document” - we use the Google Docs platform for this purpose. An alternative would be something like Etherpads, HackMD, or CodiMD. We also collect brief feedback at the end of each session akin to The Carpentries’ minute cards. For online delivery, we used the Google Forms platform to collect this feedback; if all participants are in person, sticky notes work well. All materials here are licensed under a CC-BY 4.0 license.

Organization

The first part of the workshop series focuses on developing skill as a trainer, especially in regards to helping students develop skills. These lessons are shown in the “Pedagogy Lessons” tab, in the order in which they are delivered. The second part of the workshop series provided skills development opportunities for a variety of data science tools, mostly focused around the R programming language (or R-adjacent tools). These lessons, found in the “Data Science Lessons” tab, rely on participants having R and RStudio installed on the machines they are using.