By Toby Hodges, European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) Heidelberg, Germany.

You might have seen that the full programme for CarpentryConnect Manchester 2019 was published recently. As well as exciting keynote talks and plenty of breakout sessions covering important topics relating to teaching and developing skills in research software, the conference promises to be particularly relevant for anyone interested in developing high-quality teaching material or enhancing their computational skills.

Kicking off with a new workshop, Introduction to The Carpentries Curriculum Development, led by François Michonneau from The Carpentries, the programme includes a wide range of workshops to help participants who are developing new and existing lesson material. François will orientate attendees with the existing lesson template infrastructure from The Carpentries, which makes it easy to publish well-structured, stylish lessons on the web, and provide guidance on what to think about and prioritise while developing teaching material.

The programme for day two includes a number of sessions that will further empower participants to create excellent training material. Attendees can learn how to use Git and GitHub and Binder, great resources for easily providing lessons and training material. Sessions covering plotting data in interactive maps using Jupyter notebooks, advanced technical writing, approaches for hands-on distance learning, and best practices for computational training also provide great opportunities for people to enhance their skills.

Perhaps the most exciting day of the conference is left for last: a complete day of workshops that includes opportunities to learn new tools, improve your data analysis and critical thinking skills, and dedicate time to develop new curricula. For those interested in creating new lesson content, the third day includes an overview of building a Carpentries-style lesson, followed by  four parallel sessions for curriculum development. These sessions will focus on developing training material for:

• Machine Learning & AI Carpentry

• Alternative to the Bash Shell for Windows Users

• R for Transcriptome Analysis, and

• Digital Humanities

If you’re interested in contributing to high-quality training material on any of the topics above, these sessions are for you! Information and training in the preceding sessions will provide the foundation from which conference participants can build great teaching material.

With this thread of curriculum development running through the conference programme, #CCMcr19 offers a fantastic opportunity to get to know others who are passionate about providing good computational training, learn new skills and tools to help create and publish teaching material, and time and space to actually start building that material away from the distractions of everyday working life.

If you care about sharing knowledge and enabling others to do great things, or if you simply want to take the opportunity to improve your own skillset, join us in Manchester at the end of June!

Register for CCMcr19

Already registered? Help the conference organisers with the final planning stages by letting them know which breakout and workshop sessions you’re interested in attending by filling out this very short survey: bit.ly/ccmcr19-sessions-vote.