Editing Community Data Science Workshops (Fall 2015)/Debrief (section)

== 11/7/15 ==

Topics disccussed during a freeflowin’ debrief session on CDSW Fall 2015:

Jason has some thoughts about improving the MatPlotLib session. Ask Jason.

How can we make best use of the many mentors we have? 
Should we do a mentor survey?
*find out what their experience is like  / improving the mentor experience
*their ideas on improving the student experience 
*recruit for more specific activities like logistics help - possible workshops or other follow-ons?

By session 3, did we give people enough confidence with dictionaries and lists?

How can we create better continuity and/or better telegraph the continuity between the morning and afternoon sessions? 

Would summarizing the “big points” at the end of the morning lecture be helpful?

What if we reversed  the order of the workshops so that analytics came before data collection?

What if we started the first workshop session 1 with a few examples of what they’ll be able to do by the end? 

Chris thinks ipython notebook would help make things easier for students and set up

How to make the afternoon sessions consistently more interactive? 
*comes with practice?

Should we expand Day 1 afternoon sessions beyond Baby Names?
*No. It’s good to have everyone doing the same thing.
*Yes. Let’s give people data that is structured on par with Baby Names, yet gives them a feel for the data they’ll play with in later sessions: Twitter, Wikipedia, CDC, Seattle / King County; Rotten Tomatoes 

We talk about the options for workshops in terms of where the data comes from, are we considering the how and what of each data set?  Are we helping people work with both continuous and categorical data? 

What is too much to offer? E.g. Should we offer stats in python as an afternoon session?  Yes if we make it clear what is being taught and what is a prerequisite. 

Should we separate the morning and afternoon admissions so more people could attend in the afternoon?


Why have so few students proposed to work on their own thing?

Should we do follow-on activities for students? 
*Jason is willing to kick back up the monthly meet-ups.

Improving engagement between sessions? 

Improving networking within workshops? 

Outcomes: Expanding collaboration opportunities.  I spoke a bit with one of the Fall15 CDSW students who happens to run the HCDE MS program (Liz Sanocki) and she said she did not see herself programming more on her own in the future, but did feel she gained a conceptual understanding that would make her more confident in collaborations and/or project management. 

=== Mission === 
What is the mission of this workshop?
How does CDSW differentiate from other offerings like Software Carpentry?

Mika: Our mission is to teach ordinary people to learn python and do data science 

;Student input
*What are the “types” this workshop appeals to? Their goals?
*An all time participant survey? 
*Follow-up with specific individual students e.g.  
*What do we think about so many HCDE and HCI+D students coming? 
	
;Potential metrics so far
How well do we do by the people who have atttended?
people who did science with workshop skills e.g. published papers 
follow-up to get the examples?
students who became mentors (Mika; Julia; Monica; Dharma... others?)
got jobs  
created other community resources (Miku’s meet-ups;  Illana offered her own CDSW workshop at ...?  after mentoring at CDSW 
helps students to identify other resources and/or network to find other helpers?
????
	
What are the backgrounds and types that the workshop serves well now? Are we content with that? How to improve for them? For others? 
*JMo: People playing with medium sized data sets.