Here our Training Lead, Aleksandra Nenadic has rounded up our training updates and upcoming events. If you’d like to see an upcoming workshop or an important training-related update included here, get in touch!

Training Events

Together with colleagues from the University of Manchester, we have piloted the new curriculum for intermediate research software skills for Earth, atmospheric and oceanic sciences as part of the NERC’s Software Development for Earth and Environmental Scientists: Reproducible Research through Reusable, Reliable Code programme. The workshop was held in Manchester from 27-31 March 2023 and was attended by 30 researchers and doctoral students. 

Toby Hodges (The Carpentries Director of Curriculum), Sarah Stevens (Data Science Facilitator at UW-Madison, US) and Aleksandra Nenadic (Training Team Lead at the SSI) have successfully wrapped up the second pilot workshop of the new Carpentries Lesson Development curriculum on 21-22 March 2023. The next step for this training now is to create a “train the trainer” style course, to train more trainers to deliver this course to new lesson developers. 

Byte-sized RSE is a series of events providing key research software skills in just 1 hour run by Jeremy Cohen (Imperial College London) and Steve Crouch (SSI) as part of the UNIVERSE-HPC project. The 6th instalment of ByteSized RSE  took place on 28th March 2023 and looked at how Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) can help researchers to be more efficient in writing, managing and debugging their code. Upcoming Byte-sized RSE events include: 

• Byte-sized RSE session 7 on Intermediate/Advanced Git on Wednesday 10th May 2023, 13:00-14:30 BST (UTC+1) - registration for this session is now open
• Byte-sized RSE session 8 on README files on Tuesday 6th June, 13:00-14:15 BST (UTC+1) - registration for this final session will be available soon at the Byte-sized events website.

Carpentries Superstars: How to Make the Best of Your Teaching Experience is a mini workshop scheduled for Tuesday, 2 May 2023 from 16:00 - 17:00 BST (15:00 - 16:00 UTC) at the SSI’s Collaborations Workshop 2023. This workshop will help instructors who have not had many opportunities to gain teaching experience to build confidence, give/obtain feedback and understand how they might want to develop and expand their teaching skills. 

The EPCC will run a High-Performance Computing (HPC) Summer School between 25 June and 29 July, aimed at undergraduate students at UK universities to learn and practice HPC technologies.

Instructor Training

The Institute has a few sponsored places available for The Carpentries Instructor Training, which teaches a user-centred approach to teaching others based on research into cognitive psychology and pedagogy of how we learn and how best to teach people. If you are interested in undergoing this training and improving your teaching skills, and becoming a certified Carpentries instructor - please check the training calendar and get in touch.

As of 5th April 2023, the Instructor Training webpage has a new look and feel using the new Carpentries Workbench lesson infrastructure. If you have any feedback on this version - get in touch with team@carpentries.org or report an issue in the Instructor Training GitHub repository (for issues with the content) or the Workbench GitHub repository (for issues with the lesson template).

Lesson Development

If you want to learn how to develop lessons collaboratively and have an idea for developing a new lesson from scratch with a group of collaborators you can get more information about the Carpentries Collaborative Lesson Development training or apply to join one of the workshops.

The Carpentries Incubator Lesson Spotlight is a regular feature in The Carpentries blog and Carpentries Clippings newsletter, highlighting the great work the Carpentry community is doing to develop new lessons in The Carpentries Incubator. If you would like your lesson featured in the Spotlight, to increase the visibility of your lesson or encourage the Carpentries community members to contribute to its ongoing development, fill in this form.

Research Software Camp: FAIR Software

The next Research Software Camp will be held from 19th to 30th June 2023. Over the course of two weeks, we will host a panel discussion, basic skills workshops (R, Python, visualisation, etc.) in English and other languages, and a mentorship programme (applications now closed). Curated online resources will be published addressing FAIR software and other research software aspects. The team will also be running a parallel social media campaign using #RSCamps on Twitter and LinkedIn.

The Research Software Camps (RSCs) are organised by the Software Sustainability Institute. They aim to address the lack of software skills in research through free online introductory workshops and resources and provide one-to-one support where relevant. 

UK Carpentry Community Calls

Join us every fourth Monday of the month for the monthly UK Carpentry community calls where UK Carpentry instructors, helpers and workshop coordinators (or anyone involved in training tech to researchers in general and outside of the UK) get together to hear from each other and collaborate. 

DUSC 2023 - R, Regular Expression, SQL – 9 - 12 May 2023

The University of Edinburgh will deliver the next Data Upskilling Short Course from Tuesday, 9 May to Friday, 12 May. The workshop focuses on R, Regular Expression, and SQL and aims to provide better data analysis and visualisation with R, and better data management with regular expressions and SQL. Course fees are £360, but funded places are available for employed, unemployed or furloughed people in Scotland who meet Scottish Funding Council eligibility criteria.

Let us know about your events by emailing info@software.ac.uk.