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Meeting - 24 February 2025

Meeting Info

This is the UK Carpentry Community space for the UK Carpentry instructors, helpers and workshop coordinators (or anyone involved in training tech to researchers in general and outside of the UK) to get to know each other better, update the commmunity about developments, discuss issues and ideas, and encourage collaboration.

During these meetings, we will be conforming to The Carpentries Code of Conduct.

Meeting schedule: meetings happen on 4th Monday each month, 16:00-17:00 UK time, BST (UTC+1) or GMT (UTC+0) depending on the time of the year

Meeting details are shared via local-uk mailing list and The Carpentries community calendar.

Zoom URL: https://zoom.us/j/95360073649

Meeting Minutes

  • Chair: Phil Reed
  • Timekeeper:
  • Notetaker: Andrew Walker

Agenda

  1. Assign notetaker & timekeeper
  2. Sign in & ice-breaker
  3. Review of actions
  4. Announcements
  5. Guest speaker + Q&A
  6. Instructor Training checkout questions
  7. Wrap-up/AOB

Sign-in

Name/pronoun if you like/ institution / optionally put "(checkout)" if you are here for the Instructor Training checkout:

  1. Dimitrios Theodorakis, he/him, Met Office
  2. Andrew Walker, he/him, University of Oxford
  3. Phil Reed, he/him, University of Manchester
  4. Jannetta Steyn, Newcastle University
  5. Sarah Jaffa, she, University of Manchester
  6. Aman Goel, he/him, University of Manchester
  7. Esther Turner, she/her, National Oceanography Centre
  8. Matthew Bluteau, he/him, UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA)
  9. Aleks Nenadic, she/her, SSI, University of Manchester
  10. Andrew Gait, he/him, RSE, University of Manchester

Notes

Icebreaker

What is your favorite colour?

Actions

  • Lesson template migration: seems to have been followed up, but flag with Toby H. if you need help with a lesson.
  • Reminder to future Matt: there was someone at the Edinburgh Winter School who mentioned that live coding is not a good didactic tool and there is evidence behind that; given it is quite a core principle of a lot of the Carpentries pedagogy, I am wondering what others think?

Announcments

Guest speaker and Q&A

Guest speaker: Sarah Jaffa

Book club! The Programmers Brain : read it in advance if you can and Sarah Jaffa will provide a 10 minute summary if you havn't read it.

Sarah's summary looked in particular at the first and last chapters (types of memory and onboarding new developers). Lots of links with Capentries instructor training. Book contains good advice and pointers towards why you are stuck, that it's normal to be stuck and how to get unstuck.

Read one free chapter at https://www.manning.com/books/the-programmers-brain​

Read online or watch video courses (paid account or free trial) at https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-programmers-brain/9781617298677/​

Blog summaries: ​

Discussion / Q&A:

  • What was your stratergy for getting through the book? You need to read it when you are awake - e.g. on the bus. Do exercises later (but highlight). For similar books bookclubs have help.
  • Audience incudes programmers - also seems useful for managers of programmers - is this particular for programmers? Probably true of things that push you to the limit of cogenative load (e.g. research).
  • Was keynote speaker at Edinbugh winter school. Desginged a programming languge called hedy - textual programming for the classroom. Builds towards python while limiting cogenative load. Seems cool.
  • Back to "what is real programming" - links back to winter school material where the author talked about developing material (at the Edinbugh winter school).
  • Seemed very cogenative - does it all have this focus? Yes - seems to. Follow up, is this very mechanical model really accurate? It's not presented as "this is how it works" more "this is a model, which may help you". But it is all based on academic research and well referenced so you can track it back.

Wrapup / AOB / Checkout

  • Please volunteer to chair and/or present at these calls in 2025.

Next months meeting March 24th.

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