Announcing our Software Carpentry instructor training course!

By Damien Irving.

Back in February 2013, Greg Wilson (Software Carpentry founder and computer programming educator extraordinaire) came out to Australia to host the first ever Software Carpentry bootcamps outside of Europe and North America. That visit inspired a few Aussies (myself included) to undertake the 12-week online instructor training course, and over the subsequent months a few more bootcamps were held around the country.

By late 2013 the demand for bootcamps in Australia was far greater than the small pool of volunteer instructors could handle, so we (the Research Bazaar project) decided to start supporting the regular delivery of bootcamps in and around Melbourne. We’ve been blown away by the number of people who have been willing to donate their time as part of our Software Carpentry teaching teams, but it’s fair to say that we still aren’t keeping up with demand.

To remedy this problem, we’ve invited Bill Mills (Community Manager for the Mozilla Science Lab; a.k.a Greg’s protégé) to come down to Melbourne to train up a new cohort of 40 instructors. Instead of the usual 12-week online training course, the successful applicants will complete an in-person training course over 3 intensive days (11-13 Feb, 2015). They’ll then get a chance to apply what they’ve learned by instructing and/or helping at our doctoral training conference (16-18 Feb, 2015), where we’ll running 3 bootcamps simultaneously (one in Python, MATLAB and R). To find out more, check out the FAQ page and/or head over to the Eventbrite page and fill out an application. We hope to see you in February!  



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