Advice for Teachers

Astro Hack Week is a five-day workshop about everything to do with astronomical data (note: this also includes data generated by simulations, of course!). The general structure is two-fold: mornings are reserved for tutorials, the afternoons for “hacking”, i.e. free time to work and collaborate on projects. Tutorials are designed to appeal to a large crowd, require little prior knowledge and broadly follow data analysis topics of interest. In the past, we have had tutorials on scientific computing with Python, visualization, IPython Notebooks, classical statistics, Bayesian statistics, sampling methods, data bases, and supervised and unsupervised machine learning. Every year, we re-evaluate the topics, and adjust (sometimes more, sometimes less) based on the interest of the participants that year.

The afternoons are deliberately open-ended. We encourage participants to come with ideas of projects to work on, but also urge them to be open to abandon plans and collaborate on another person’s project if that sounds more interesting. We deliberately use the term “hacking” in the broadest possible sense: it includes writing documentation and tutorials, making twitter bots, writing up ethnographic field notes, improving Figures from a book, collaboratively learning Deep Neural Networks by example, along with, of course, working on scientific projects. The afternoons also include "break-out sessions": these are short tutorials or talks on topics that are not covered in the tutorials, but that many participants would like to hear more about. Many of them arise spontaneously based on demand and availability of someone to teach them. Some come out of the morning tutorials, for example if a specific (sub-)topic is of broad interest, but the teachers did not have time for it during the morning.

As a whole, Astro Hack Week is very different from standard conferences and summer schools in several way, and it’s useful to point out those differences in order to make clear why we’ve designed Astro Hack Week is they way it is:

• Unlike standard conferences, there are no science talks. The idea is not to present research, but to make research happen.
• Unlike a summer school, Astro Hack Week is deliberately engineered to appeal to a very broad audience. We admit participants from all academic levels (from undergraduates to senior faculty members) and all sub-fields of astronomy (and some who are not astronomers at all!). Whereas at a summer school, mostly junior participants listen to mostly senior lecturers, at Astro Hack Week, there will invariably be both novices and experts on any given topic in the audience. This, however, is a feature, not a bug. As organizers, we try to foster an open and inclusive atmosphere where questions are encouraged and everyone attends with a mindset of learning from others.

With that in mind, here are some ideas and suggestions for designing tutorials. None of these are mandatory, of course, but they are based on what we learned worked well in the past two years, so we hope they’ll be useful.

1. Your tutorial should be understandable to senior undergraduates. Do not worry about the tutorial being too easy. It won’t be. In the past, we’ve learned that participants have a very high tolerance toward repetition, and many have welcomed the opportunity to review their knowledge, and have been surprised by what they learned after all.
2. Err on the side of designing more of a tutorial than a lecture. Many participants will want to try out their new-found knowledge in the afternoons. In the past, we’ve learned that they tend to prefer tutorial-style sessions rather than straight lectures. Short lectures interspersed with examples and small exercises seem to work best, with no more than 50% of the total time spent lecturing. Many lecturers have found Jupyter notebooks to be a valuable resource, though we’ve also seen great tutorials that involved blackboard exercises solved by the entire group. Either can work great.
3. Three hours are really short! Most likely, we’ve asked you to speak on a topic that is normally the subject of a full semester (or even multiple semesters). This necessarily requires stripping the topic down to the basics. The two guiding principles should be: (a) Teach enough of the basics so that participants have heard the most important terms and can look up some details later (bonus points for literature recommendations!), (b) teach them so that they can immediately apply concepts on their own projects, which they will likely want to do in the afternoon. Invariably, you will have too much material. That's okay. Teach the most important parts, perhaps focus on a specific application, and allow participants to follow up on what you didn't get to by themselves (this is one of the reasons why we aim to make all materials available).
4. Related to (3), practical knowledge trumps comprehensive theory. In the past, we’ve found that the best mix involved some (mathematical) theory (the audience is mostly physicists, after all), but long derivations might detract from the important concepts and take up time that could be better spent on exercises.
5. The presence of experts in the audience is a feature: use it! In the past, we’ve found that some teachers found the presence of other experts a bit intimidating, however, it shouldn’t be. Use them to your advantage instead! It is perfectly reasonable (and indeed encouraged) to ask the experts in the room to help you, especially during the exercises. Ask them to identify themselves at the start of the tutorial, and to help with questions during exercises. Most of them will be happy to do so, and it facilitates exactly the kind of collaboration we are encouraging during the afternoons, too. Pass any question about the topic you might not know the answer to on to them. Some of the best learning experiences at Astro Hack Week have resulted from two or three of the experts on a topic coming up with different (sometimes contradictory) answers to the same question.

All of us organizers have taught at Astro Hack Week in the past. Without fail, the experience has been both fun and rewarding. The audience at Astro Hack Week is motivated, curious, engaged and generally truly interested in what you have to teach.

For more information, you can find the website of this Astro Hack Week here (and of the previous meetings here, here and here). Daniela has written a few blog posts on Astro Hack Week as a whole. All materials of the previous two workshops are online on github here, here and here. Finally, last year we live-streamed tutorials and put them on youtube.

If you are still not sure, please feel free to e-mail us and we will be happy to help.