Creating exercises

[tobyhodges]

Now that we have learner profiles and learning objectives drafted, as well as some concept maps for the tutorial, it's time to start creating some exercises for formative assessment 🎉

A good starting point would probably be to aim for (at least) one exercise per sub-point in the list of learning objectives (currently on the tutorial landing page). We don't necessarily need exercises for the "lesson-level" objectives - ideally these will be covered by those for the more fine-grained objectives - but, if you have a good idea for something like a "capstone" exercise for assessing these higher-level learning objectives, that's welcome too 🙂

Background Reading

For some background and guidance about what kind of exercises we should be aiming for, I recommend the following resources (please post additional suggestions in the comments):

• The Exercise Types chapter of Greg Wilson's Teaching Tech Together (TtT)
• See examples of good exercises in these lessons:
  • Storing Multiple Values in Lists from the Software Carpentry Programming with Python lesson
  • Navigating Files and Directories from the Data Carpentry Introduction to Command Line for Genomics lesson
  • Libraries from the Library Carpentry lesson Python Intro for Libraries

If you're interested in the theory and motivation behind creating these kinds of exercises for formative assessment, I recommend reading the following:

• The Mental Models and Formative Assessment chapter of Teaching Tech Together
• And the Building Skill with Practice episode of The Carpentries Instructor Training Curriculum, which covers much the same material as the TtT chapter linked above, but is also a good example of the kind of lesson material we want to create.

Lastly: if you're interested to learn more about the process we're following to develop this tutorial, then the chapter A Lesson Design Process from TtT is a great reference.

Practicalities

• because we're working from The Carpentries' lesson template, this guide for contributing to their lessons is a good reference for this project too
  • more detail in their Curriculum Development Handbook
  • we'll also have a call (scheduled for 14 May 2020) to go through the infrastructure and the contribution process in detail
  • anyway, please don't worry about getting something wrong! there'll be time to polish the material later, and we want you to contribute and are more than happy to help you with that
• please create one Pull Request per draft exercise, including mention of which learning objective the exercise would assess
• write draft exercises in the episode file containing the relevant objective
  • [update] placeholder episode files for each set of objectives can be found in the _episodes directory. Please add your exercises to these files. Markdown documents saved here will become episode pages, and be added to the "Episodes" dropdown menu in the rendered lesson.

[swzCuroverse]

A note that we will be working on adding exercises and working to finish this tutorial as part of our work for the CZI EOSS grant. More to come...

[tobyhodges]

This sounds very exciting, @swzCuroverse

[swzCuroverse]

Yes! @tobyhodges , @mr-c is helping as well as @tetron. I would love for you to review our work as we move along if you have bandwidth. @tetron works at Curii with me (@mr-c works closely with us and helped us write the grant) so everyone is in the proverbial loop :)

[tobyhodges]

Very happy to review anything you come up with, time permitting.

(BTW this lesson would fit nicely in The Carpentries Incubator while it's being developed, but I understand why you might prefer to keep it within the CWL ecosystem.)

[swzCuroverse]

I believe our plan is to keep it in the Carpentries style in the Carpentries system if at all possible. So, let's see about that!

[tobyhodges]

👍 Feel free to ping me if & when you need more information

[skanwal]

Hi @swzCuroverse

I have been keen to find sometime to help with drafting a couple exercises. Initially, planning to start with https://github.com/common-workflow-lab/cwl-novice-tutorial/issues/8 and then possibly also look into https://github.com/common-workflow-lab/cwl-novice-tutorial/blob/gh-pages/_episodes/outputs.md.

Please let me know if this is fine? Happy to take inputs at any point.

[swzCuroverse]

Hi @skanwal that sounds great. We have had a bi-weekly meeting where we have been meeting about our work - perhaps you could join us and talk about what you wanted to work on and we can sync up? I can PM you? We can reschedule the time to work with your time zone in Australia.

[swzCuroverse]

In the meantime, feel free to work and we can offer comments via github, etc :)

[skanwal]

@swzCuroverse - sounds great, I'll be keen to join bi-weekly discussions as well and thanks for considering time-zone difference.
My email ID is kanwals@unimelb.edu.au. Please feel free to send me an email and we can hopefully workout a time that suits everyone.

I am going through recent PRs from @bcosc and feedback from Michael and Toby. Will start working on a draft exercise in coming week.

[mr-c]

FYI, there will be a hackathon for this effort on March 22 and 23rd. Registration will open next week and in the mean time we are gathering details over at https://github.com/common-workflow-lab/cwl-novice-tutorial/wiki/2021-Lesson-Hackathon

[skanwal]

@mr-c thanks for this info.
I have marked these dates in my calendar. The sessions are starting an hour before midnight in Australia (Melbourne) but will try best to attend as I have grasped the main understanding, format and the concept behind the tutorial exercises through script episode.

Also, noticed a small typo in the date mentioned on the page for day2. It was 2021-02-23, instead of 2021-03-23. I was able to directly edit the page, hence updated it (hoping there are no issues?)