Matlab novice materials

[IsaKiko]

Hi @ashwinsrnth

we did a test-run of the Matlab material last week. The material worked really well and I think it's in a fantastic state During the course, we came up with a few ideas to improve parts of it. I'm happy to implement, but would like your input beforehand:

Lesson 1:

• I explained the colon operator during the magic square section, because we use it anyway and skipped it in lesson 2, which worked well. We could move this section into "Accessing Array Elements".
• The wording of the first challenge confused everyone, maybe better to have "Predict the values of the variables..." instead of "Draw a diagram". We should also consider maybe reenforcing that if a = 3 b = 3 c = a*b b = 4 c is still 9? Lesson 2:
• The first teaching part goes for a very long time without a challenge. I'd suggest we have a short challenge (i.e. create a script, do something simple, save it) before "for loops".
• The last challenge we thought might work better if it reenforced using templates as they were just taught. Maybe we could have a first challenge using templates and for everyone who's a bit more advanced leave this one in there. It seemed a bit much for our novices in the room. Lesson 3:
• Call stacks I skipped while teaching and so does @DamienIrving in his python course. Have you had any experience with this? Do you think it should be taught or could we just delete it altogether?
• I think it's nice to come back to the overarching story every once in a while. So I think it's nice to have an example turning the inflammation script into a function. In an ad hoc attempt to do this, I used "range" as an input variable, letting people choose what data files they want to look at (only the first 5, file 5:7 etc.). Lesson 4:
• The testing section kinda appears out of no-where. This could maybe start off lesson 5.
• The heatmap example would have likely been too challenging for our participants, so we dropped it for an easier example. I'm happy to leave it in, just wondering if you had similar experiences. (Lesson 5: Do you teach the "debugging" part or do you just let your participants read it?)

Let me know what you think. :)

Cheers, Isabell

[shwina]

@IsaKiko

Congratulations on a successful session. Thanks for the extremely valuable feedback!

1. +1. How about a box after the "Acessing Array Elements" section? Maybe something like, "The colon operator that we've been using also has another vital role: generating sequences .... "
2. I think this is the wording used in the Python lessons, and I'm in support of changing it.
3. +1
4. This challenge was contributed by @jmxpearson, and I think it's very slick. It made me realize that templates are maybe a silly way to handle the problem. But, I think templates win over ls+strsplit when we have a specific pattern to match. For example, if we had some other .csv files that we didn't want to work with. If we had taught ls+strsplit in the lesson, maybe learners would find the challenge easier. What do you think? Should we teach one or the other?
5. I skipped call stacks when I taught the material as well. I vote we keep the material and let instructors decide.
6. +1 for a theme-related challenge.
7. Absolutely. I vote we change the section to "documentation". Moving the "testing" bit to lesson 5 has an additional advantage. We can demonstrate this sort of "interactive testing", and emphasize that it's hard to redo. Instead, using assertions in a script is a far superior way to write tests.
8. I'm open to reviewing an easier example. I also felt like learners had a hard time with this.
9. When I taught with this material, the final section was a bit hurried (and I feel bad about it). Ideally, I feel like this should be a discussion between instructors and learners about how they currently debug and test their code, and how the things they have learned today can help them do better.

Again, thanks so much for this. I'd be happy to work with you in implementing. Proposal: one of us can work forwards and the other backwards, and review each other's changes. Also, we can bring them up as issues to attract PRs.

I'm behind on addressing the issue of extracting the lessons from bc:

https://github.com/aaren/swc-novice-matlab/issues/1

I'll do that tonight so we can get started ASAP.

Thanks :)

[IsaKiko]

@ashwinsrnth Awesome, thanks! Sorry for my late response, I've had a crazy couple of weeks. Should get better next week though.

1. I'm happy teaching either one solution. I think novices might get lost if we teach two solutions to the same problem.
2. +1
3. Sounds good, let's do that!
4. The one I did was just coming back to the inflammation function and asking people to have a variable to allow them to turn plotting and saving plots on and off. That might have been a bit simple, but by that time I think they needed something light ;)
5. Discussion is a great idea. I might do that. Cheers.

I gotta admit, I'm a bit lost at the moment as to where the lessons are and where we should change them. It's hard to follow all the discussions. Are they now in the aaren repository?

"one of us can work forwards and the other backwards" - sounds good. Happy with either.

Again, thanks for the reply.

[DamienIrving]

@IsaKiko The novice MATLAB materials have been successfully extracted from the bc repo and now live here forevermore (i.e. this is where you should make all your changes): https://github.com/swcarpentry/matlab-novice-inflammation

Greg is going to write an update blog post about the bc repo split on Monday.

[shwina]

Hi, @IsaKiko

The new home for the material is here: https://github.com/swcarpentry/matlab-novice-inflammation

We have to conform to the new lesson template, a description of which, I think is here: http://software-carpentry.org/blog/2014/10/new-lesson-template-v2.html

I can do the research and write up an issue about the changes we'll need to make, but in the meanwhile, I don't see why we can't work on improving the lesson material itself. As far as the changes we've proposed here are concerned, I'll elect to work backwards :-)

I'm closing this now, and we can continue discussion in the new repo.

[DamienIrving]

@IsaKiko @ashwinsrnth For the latest info on the lesson template, the README in the following repo is probably more informative than that blog post: https://github.com/swcarpentry/lesson-template

[shwina]

Thanks, @DamienIrving!

[IsaKiko]

Cheers @DamienIrving