Software Carpentry Workshop in Namibia

Written by Bertie Seyffert, Jessica Upani, Gabriel Nhinda

26 September 2016

We held a two-day Software Carpentry workshop at The University of Namibia (UNAM), Windhoek on the 22nd – 23rd of August 2016. This was the first Software Carpentry in Namibia and the first for the trainers Jessica Upani and Gabriel Nhinda as well, both from the University of Namibia. There was also a seasoned instructor from the North West University: Bertie Syffert.

How was the workshop proposed?

Sometimes opportunities come when you least expect it, and it is how you deal with them that matters the most. We were privileged enough to have attended a Software Carpentry Instructors training in Potchefstroom (thanks Anelda, Talarify, Vincent Knight and NWU eResearch), and a requirement for completing the training is to run a workshop at the trainee instructors home institution. It was at the instructors training that we met Bertie Seyffert (who was a helper) and Anelda van der Walt. Towards the end of the training workshop we learned that Bertie would be coming to Namibia for a few days and wouldn’t mind helping out with a Software Carpentry workshop.

Time flew by so quickly and a few meetings later all seemed to be great in terms organising the FIRST Software Carpentry workshop in Namibia. That was a setup, all went well! Dates set, web page done, venue booked, catering sorted. Before we knew it we had 28 people signed up for the workshop. Bertie and Maryke (one of the helpers) flew in from South Africa. The workshop was possible thanks to Talarify, H.E.S.S through the Department of Physics and School of Computing both from UNAM.

Pre-workshop 

We held an installation party the day before the workshop started and two (2) people showed up. Here we installed all the required tools and software. This step took us some time but in the end, less time was spent on installing software on the first day of the workshop, although there were people who did not show up to the installation party that still needed help with installations.

Day 1 

 The instructors and helpers made the final preparations to the venue before the attendees showed up. Bertie introduced the workshop, and the aims and objectives of software carpentry to the participants. Gabriel commenced the workshop with the UNIX Shell for the morning session. Being that the majority of attendees never used the UNIX Shell, we had to deviate from the schedule. The attendees were eager to learn more on how they could use the shell to automate some of their repetitive tasks and an extra hour of the afternoon session was used for that purpose. Bertie commenced with Programming with python for the rest of the afternoon and the day ended on a positive note. 

Day 2

Day two was reserved for Python and Github. Jessica started off the day working through the python lesson from where Bertie left off the previous day. Bertie took over after a lovely lunch. The GitHub lesson covered version control in detail. This lesson went a bit over schedule by an hour as we were moving at the pace of the audience.

Lessons Learned

The planning was a bit tight and for future Carpentry workshops we will try to have everything confirmed and double confirmed well in advance. Also, the afternoon tea on the last day was rather delayed and we learned that coding gives people caffeine withdrawal symptoms. We also learned to order more snacks than the total number of people or provide extra snacks.

There will be some attendees who will not have all the software and data files on their computers. So be prepared to start your workshop an hour late. 

Test your lessons before hand and make sure that they are running on both Unix based and Windows based computers.

When advertising your workshop or during the acceptance of your attendees, be very mindful of the audience that you are targeting. We accepted both undergraduate students and researchers such as professors and the difference between them was distinct. They both had different needs and expectations from the workshop.

Get sponsors for your workshop so that you avoid having to charge a registration fee because this slows down the responses that you will get significantly.

Observations

During the UNIX shell some of the commands such as ls did not work on the windows machines although they worked on some of our laptops prior to the lesson being started. The reason could be that the instructed had installed certain packages for work related to other projects that required those packages.

Five (5) attendees registered but did not show up, this could be attributed to the fact that it was a free workshop. For future workshops a small amount will be charged to try and persuade commitment.

Some attendees only attended the workshop in patches and thus some were lost upon return. Thanks to the amazing helpers that we had in Maryke, Eli Kasai, Gabriel, Bertie and Jessica we tried to catch them up as quickly as possible.

Some peer instruction was also observed as the attendees tried to help their colleagues when they saw a red sticky note. For the major part they managed to solve the issue, often it was syntax, indentation on Python or Case sensitivity, which caused most of the errors.

When an instructor found it difficult to explain a certain concept or find some analogy that would help the attendees understand the content better, another was there to assist, which we found to be most helpful. It further helped get the attendees comfortable, as they didn’t feel as though they had to sit and listen to subject experts in a passive manner. This really encouraged an active learning experience.

The attendees did mention that at some point they felt as though they didn’t grasp certain concepts to the full extend they wished. Some also felt that the examples provided were skewed towards certain fields of study. Adding that they wished they could bring some of their own data to practice on to see how they might find value in the skills they are learning. The latter was explained to the participants as generic data and not intentionally designed to exclude fields. Being that the project is on github, participants were encouraged to try and contribute exercises to the data carpentry lessons.