A Software Carpentry bootcamp? I want one of those…

By Damien Irving.

Let’s say you’ve just attended your first ever Software Carpentry bootcamp, or you’ve been speaking to a colleague who told you how awesome they are. No matter your position on the academic ladder (i.e. Masters student through to Professor), if you think your colleagues or students would benefit from a crash course in computer programming, we can help you out. Here’s three case studies to show you how a bootcamp can go from an idea to reality:

1. Student driven bootcamp

Through helping researchers with their programming, we frequently come into contact with students who tell us that many of the people in their lab/department would benefit from a bootcamp. For our November 2013 bootcamp (see the website and tumblr post), we got 7 of these students together and booked a teaching space with 7 tables (each of which could accommodate 6-7 chairs). We then asked those students to bring along enough of their colleagues to fill one table. We ended up with one or more tables from meteorology, biology, biomechanics, finance and medicine, which made for a really great event.

2. Co-hosted bootcamp

A couple of students on the committee of COMBINE - a bioinformatics group aimed at students and early-career researchers in Australia - heard about the November 2013 bootcamp and asked if we’d like to co-host a bootcamp for the Melbourne bioinformatics community (i.e. they’d provide the people, and we’d provide the teaching). We said yes of course, and the event was a big success (read all about it here). 

3. Lecturer driven bootcamp

Matthew Dimmock is a lecturer in medical imaging at Monash Uni. He came across Software Carpentry one day when searching for ways to increase the programming skills of his students. They put him in contact with us, and Matthew came along to the November 2013 bootcamp as a helper to see what happens at a typical bootcamp. He liked what he saw, so we are now helping him organise a bootcamp for medical imaging researchers.

So if you’re in Melbourne and would like to hold a bootcamp for your research discipline, please get in touch either via email (research.bazaar@gmail.com) or by coming along to Hacky Hour to have a chat! (You can also check out our Software Carpentry FAQs for more details.)

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  1. resbaz posted this