Teaching basic lab skills
for research computing

Day 9

Week two of Software Carpentry, and things are starting to settle down. There are now 93 (!) people signed up for the course:

U of T Elsewhere
Auditing 18 21
Enrolled 25  
Unknown 29  

Of those actually at the University of Toronto (as opposed to the
local hospitals—a few radiologists are sitting in) the breakdown
is:

16 Computer Science
14 Physics
9 Civil Engineering
  Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
5 Biochemistry
  Institute for Aerospace Studies
2 Institute of Medical Science
  Mathematics
1 Astronomy
  Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering
  Botany
  Geology
  Medical Biophysics
  Zoology
  Non-degree student

This week's lecture went much more smoothly than last week's, in part because we were in a larger room, with seating for everyone, and in part because the content was an introduction to Python, which I've given more times than I can count. There were still some glitches in the slides, though: a few things were out of order, and I really do need to choose more concrete examples. 33 students have completed the first exercise, which is already more than I'd expected—I'm feeling uncharacteristically optimistic right now ;-)

The past week has also CSC49X, the fourth-year Computer Science project course. 23 students are working on 10 different projects (24 and 11 respectively, if you count Sean Dawson's paid-but-not-for-course-credit work on a sequence diagram debugger plugin for Eclipse). DrProject (our Trac-derived project management system) is holding up so far, and we're almost finished setting it up for two other courses to use this term as well. Not bad for Day 9 of term; not bad at all.