Meeting - 24 March 2025

• Meeting - 24 March 2025
  • Meeting Info
  • Meeting Minutes
    • Agenda
    • Sign-in
    • Notes

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.

• Community's HackMD workspace
• Previous & upcoming meetings
• Meeting notes template
• Chairing rota
• Guest speaker sign-up

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

Meeting Minutes

• Chair:
  • Andrew Walker
  • Make sure to email instructor.training@carpentries.org after the meeting with trainee instructors who joined for the community discussion as part of the checkout
• Timekeeper:
• Notetaker: Phil Reed

Agenda

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

Sign-in

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

1. Juan Herrera / he/him / EPCC, The University of Edinburgh
2. Esther Turner / she/her / National Oceanography Centre
3. Andrew Walker / he/him / University of Oxford Earth Sciences
4. Phil Reed / he.him / University of Manchester.
5. Jannetta Steyn / she, her / Newcastle University
6. Robert Chisholm / University of Sheffield
7. Danielle Sieh (she/her) / The Carpentries
8. Lucia Michielin/ She,her/ University of Edinburgh -EFI
9. Aman Goel / he,him / University of Manchester - SSI
10. Colin Sauze / he,him / National Oceanography Centre
11. Andrew Gait / he,him / RSE, University of Manchester

Notes

Review of actions

Forward the action item at the end of this document.

Announcements

• Glossaro co-working session and survey in Slack. Survey open until 31 March. Co-working session 7 May.

• Call from Edinburgh winter school, working on book. Call for contributions

  • Edinburgh Winter School - an SSI-supported annual event that brings together programming educators from higher education and beyond. I will also talk about a related project - an edited book where we would like to gather experiences, tips and case studies from educators and students in the programming space. Everyone is welcome to contribute - see https://pairprogramming.ed.ac.uk/category/book/, and come to the Community Call to hear more!
  • https://pairprogramming.ed.ac.uk/book-call-for-pitches/

• Call for feedback on GenAI in Carpentries lessons: https://github.com/swcarpentry/python-novice-gapminder/pull/697

  • Session 3 tomorrow on case studies at 12:00 and 21:00 UTC. Two workshops, two blog posts so far. Guidance starting to go into Python lessons (example gapminder).
  • most recent blog post: https://carpentries.org/blog/2025/02/the-ethics-of-teaching-llms-in-carpentries-workshops/
  • Would be nice to have code to get the same responses every time (seeded). Is that possible?
    • Unlikely?
    • Edinburgh created a ring-fenced version for students and staff.
    • Google AI studio allows you to set temperature to 0, which will always return the highest probability response, which they describe as deterministic

• Genomics workshop change, fee associated (because of the cost to deliver). Defining what is a self-organised workshop. Definition of a centrally organised workshop. Questions: team@carpentries.org

• GitHub Education Maintainers Month, call for academic/research open source projects for highlighting in May. Potential exposure for your code. Deadline 31 March.

• Different submission form to register incubator workshops, so as not to skew the main workshops. Working on a new way to take this in, see the Incubator webpage. Incubator workshops don't have the same pre- and post-workshop survey, has different/extra requirements.

• NERC has decided which projects to fund for advanced training short courses. Varients of Software Carpentry lessons. 9 or 12 workshops proposed.

Instructor Training checkout questions

Wrap-up/AOB

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

Actions

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?

Next meeting 28 April.

Change of date of May meeting to Tuesday 20 May!!