Editing Community Data Science Workshops (Spring 2014)/Reflections (section)

== General Feedback ==

One important goal was help get learners as close to independence as possible. We felt that most learners did not make it all the way. In a sense, our our final session seemed to let out a little bit on a low point in the class: Many users had learned enough that they were able to start venturing out on their own but not enough that they were not struggling enormously in the process.

One suggestion to try to address this is to add an additional half-day session with no lecture or planned projects. Learners could come and mentors will be with them to work on ''their'' projects. Of course, we want everybody to be able to come so we should also create a set of "random" projects for folks that don't have projects yet.

* The spacing between sessions too large. In part, this was due to the fact that we were creating curriculum as we went. Next time, we will try to do the sessions every other week (e.g., 4 sessions in 5 weeks).
* The breaks for lunch were a bit too long. We took 1 hour-long breaks but 45 minutes would have been enough. Learners were interested in getting back to work!
* The general structure of the entire curriculum was not as clear as it might have been which led to some confusion. This was, at least in part, because the details of what we would teach in the later sessions were not decided when we began. In the future, we should present the entire session plan clearly up front.
* We did not have enough mentors with experience using Python in Windows. We had many skilled GNU/Linux users and ''zero'' students running GNU/Linux. Most of the mentors used Mac OSX and most of the learners ran Windows.
* Although we did not use it as a recruitment or selection criteria, a majority of the participants in the session were women. Although we had a mix of men and women mentors, the fact that most of our mentors were male and most of our learners were female was something we would have liked to avoid. If we expect to have a similar ratio in the future, we should try to recruit female mentors and, in particular, to attract women to lead the afternoon sessions (all of the afternoon session lead mentors were male).
* The SWC-style sticky notes worked extremely well but were used less, and seemed to have less value, as we progressed.

In the future We might also want to spend time devoting more time explicitly to teaching: 

* Debugging code
* Finding and reading documentation
* Troubleshooting and looking at StackExchange for answers to programming questions

=== Budget ===

For lunch we spent between $400 (pizza), $360 (a few less pizzas), and $600 (for fancy Indian food). This was for 50 students and ~15 mentors but we assumed about 60 people would actually be there at each session. We also spent ~$50 in the mornings for coffee.

Most mentors could not make the follow-up sessions so we spent about $100 per session on mentor dinners. If more people showed up, it would have been closer to $200-250 per mentor dinner.

All of our food was generously supported by the [http://escience.washington.edu/ eScience Institute at UW]. The rooms were free because they were provided by [http://www.com.washington.edu UW Department of Communication]

If you had a total budget would be in the order of $2000-2500, I think you could easily do a similar 3.5 day-long set of workshops. If we had a little more, we could do better than pizza for lunch.

<!--  LocalWords:  CDSW BPW JSON
 -->