Software Carpentry teaching notes

blahah commented 8 years ago

Just an issue for me to record ideas, problems etc. when teaching SC.

blahah commented 8 years ago

shell novice

Users have to go back to the home page for the unit each time - should be able to navigate next and previous
When introducing the shell, jumps right into the working directory commands with little explanation. In my experience users find this confusing - GUIs never have the concept of being 'in' a directory
Why introduce the term orthogonal? It is, ironically, orthogonal to the unit.
Don't say 'just', 'obviously', 'basically' - they make people feel stupid
The TOC goes from [1..6] but the file names go from [0..5] - needlessly confusing?

blahah commented 8 years ago

lots of use of the word 'magic' across all three modules so far - makes mechanistic understanding seem out of reach
the exercises are written to be used with ipython notebook, but we didn't use that. This makes some of the exercise choices very difficult (e.g. in Analysing Data from Multiple Files a loop calls matplotlib.pyplot.show() once per input file)