Get involved in Climatematch Academy!

An energetic group of computational climate scientists is putting together a climate foundations educational workshop next year! We are looking for interested volunteers to help put together the curriculum, which will be entirely based on Python and Jupyter notebooks and will rely heavily on Pangeo software.

We are especially looking for ocean and atmospheric scientists interested to help put together some notebooks on various ocean topics in the modern-day climate.

See a brief description in the flyer below! The links in the flyer are broken, but you can access them here:

Feel free to ask questions in this thread as well!

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Sounds awesome @paigem!

The volunteer form says:

The existing climate science research community severely underrepresents the global population that will be impacted by climate change. In effort to build a global and diverse climate science community, Climatematch Academy is building on the successful Neuromatch Academy teaching model, with the potential to reach thousands of students worldwide. To learn more about Neuromatch check out this video to hear about the organization first hand!

This virtual two week program introduces fundamentals of climate science by taking advantage of open-source, python-based tools, to access, analyze and interpret climate data. Participants are matched based on common interests, timezone and preferred language. Participants receive personalized support as they work through hands-on tutorials and collaborate on course projects.
Is there a target audience

So there is an explicit goal of reaching underrepresented communities? Does that mean content should be designed with specific questions in mind that might affect these communities?

Is language localisation a priority?

Who is the audience? High school graduates? Undergraduate? What level of knowledge should be assumed, i.e. scientifically literate or general?

Sorry if this sounds a bit interrogatory!

Cheers

Aidan

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These are fantastic questions @Aidan!

So there is an explicit goal of reaching underrepresented communities? Does that mean content should be designed with specific questions in mind that might affect these communities?

Yes! We do want to target (though not exclusively) historically underrepresented communities globally. We have started discussions of how to, e.g., tailor climate applications to specific regions. However, another primary goal is to provide a general background to computational climate modeling using open-source Python tools, and so the content will be somewhat generic for all attendees (especially for our first year).

Is language localisation a priority?

Do you mean spoken language (as opposed to computer language)? If so, this is a very good point and one that I don’t think we haven’t discussed much (though I missed a few meetings, so I may be wrong!). I have discussed this with other groups and think this is very important. Our team speaks a range of different languages, and so this is surely something that we will discuss further!

Who is the audience? High school graduates? Undergraduate? What level of knowledge should be assumed, i.e. scientifically literate or general?

We are focusing on undergraduate and above, at least for our first year. I don’t know if we have set pre-requisites yet, but we are discussing a one-week crash course in Python prior to the 2-week school. In this way, we can be open to folks of any coding ability.

With these great questions, I hope you will consider joining us and helping us set up this initiative @Aidan! It would be great to have you on board!