lesson objectives of first lesson

[psteinb]

Check that the learning objectives are complete and correct for the first lesson with reference to lesson-outline.md.

Use to cdh as a guideline on how to write lesson objectives.

[tkphd]

From The Carpentries' Curriculum Development Handbook:

5.2.1 Learning objectives

Great news - you’ve already almost completed writing your learning objectives! The skills list that you developed for your lesson can be easily transformed to learning objectives. Learning objectives are statements that communicate to learners the skills they can expect to gain from the lesson. They should always be framed from the learner’s perspective and use action words. In other words, they should emphasize what a learner will be able to do not what they will know. For example, the first episode of the Data Carpentry lesson Introduction to the Command Line for Genomics includes the following learning objectives:

• Describe key reasons for learning shell.
• Navigate your file system using the command line.
• Access and read help files for bash programs and use help files to identify useful command options.
• Demonstrate the use of tab completion, and explain its advantages.

If you didn’t use action words when creating your skills list, there are many existing resources available that list action verbs associated with different levels of learning (one example). For our purposes, the differences among these levels isn’t as important as using action verbs in defining your learning objectives. When learning objectives are framed in this way, learners should be able to self-evaluate whether they have completed each learning objective and concretely understand what they have gained from the lesson or what they still need to work on.

Keeping in mind our discussion of cognitive load above, each episode should have ~5-7 learning objectives. If you have more than that, you should consider splitting the material into multiple episodes.

[tkphd]

The current objectives are:

• Be able to describe what an HPC system is.
• Identify how an HPC system could benefit you.

[bkmgit]

Maybe helpful to add knowing when to use a cluster as an objective, The current lesson at https://hpc-intro.hpc-carpentry.org/ has the objectives

• Use the UNIX shell (also known as terminal or command line) to operate a computer, connect to a cluster, and write simple shell scripts.
• Submit and manage jobs on a cluster using a scheduler, transfer files, and use software through environment modules.

Pull request for adding the objective

• know when to use a cluster
  at Update index.md #291
  Rather than just describe an HPC system, one may also want to describe workflows, differentiating between capacity and capability computing, as well as infrastructures that support these