Feedback from 2021-09-17

[ewallace]

EW delivered to CDT-BAI 1st year students with helper Sandy Nelson, on 2021-09-17. Started at 10:05, coffee break 11:15, resumed 11:30, ended 12:30. In that time we covered the introduction, Data management, and Software sections, with a little on "What next". The students mostly seemed to have previous software experience so was on the more skilled end of the crowd.

Instructor feedback (EW)

Good:

• interesting discussions with good engagement
• great discussions about how to really do good practices as habits and motivations for that
• plenty of "lived experience"
• nice section about data management
• good discussion on open data formats
• good discussion around tidy data
• surprising discussion about functions vs object oriented
• tests can be examples of usage as well as documentation

Bad:

• uneven engagement on collab doc, some people turned their cameras off
• more strategic use of breakout rooms could keep people engaged
• timing was pretty bad, our estimates are unrealistic
• it is difficult to teach from the big blocks of text in the current lesson, they can be cut down a lot.
• I agree with the student feedback that we need more thorough overview at the beginning.

Student Feedback

One thing you would keep about today's workshop:

• student involvement
• shared working document
• hearing examples from experience
• hearing everyones lived experiences and all the tools out there

One thing you would change about today's workshop:

• add actual implementation of best practices
• time to cover the other material (or links to read up on them in own time)
• provide specific toy examples of an issue (e.g more code snippets/diagrams),
• more of an overview of the whole session and key topics to discuss before getting started