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Community Data Science Workshops (Fall 2014)/Reflections
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== Session 0: Python Setup == The goal of this session was to get users setup with Python and starting to learn some Python basics. We changed the curriculum originally used by BPW enormously to use Continuum's Anaconda instead of Python directly from [http://python.org python.org]. The result was staggering. Not a ''single person'' reported "many problems with set-up" (i.e., respondents reported either "no problems" or a "few problems.") That said, we had several major concerns: * Anaconda is not free software/open source. * Anaconda does not support Python 3 which we'd like to move to. * Anaconda seems to have at least some remaining i10n bugs. For example, one student had a home directory set to a Chinese string which caused the Anaconda installation to fail at a late stage. This was eventually fixed by a mentor who changed the path by hand. Additionally, we moved the Windows curriculum from away from <code>cmd</code> to using Powershell. This was an huge and unqualified improvement because it meant that <code>ls</code> works and the rest of the curriculum could converge. The only concerns were that Powershell is not installed on Windows XP although ''not a single student had Windows XP''. Changes for next time include: * Because it was less necessary, we will deemphasize recruiting mentors to the Friday night session. Many folks were standing around. * Because Powershell was successful, we're going to try to create a single consolidated set of installation instructions for Windows, Mac OSX, and GNU/Linux * We will make it more clear to mentors whether participants should self-report theyβd completed the steps or whether the mentor should verify that the steps were all taken (the latter). In future, we will email mentors ahead of time to let them know. * In a related issue, not everybody loves the checkout step. Maybe there's a way we can make it more fun? * We need to do a better job of modeling sticky notes so folks use them more effectively. * The sticky notes we bought were small and ambiguous color. We should get large red sticky notes next time. * We should set up/arrange/select space to facilitate better circulation of mentors. Generally, we found that when mentors can circulate easily things are better for participants. * We are going to try writing additional installation instructions that do not rely on Anaconda so people have a fully open source option. * Once again, not a single person outside of the mentor group ran GNU/Linux. We should strongly consider how much effort we want to put into maintaining this part of the curriculum which, to date, has never been used. * We want to seriously investigate the possibility of moving to Python 3 to try to address lingering Unicode issues. We also had [[Community Data Science Workshops (Fall 2014)/Reflections#Mentorship|a bunch of general feedback on how we could improvement mentorship]] that is particularly relevant to this session.
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