kicking off the education thread by referring to the
Pangeo Outreach Education Training working group. See the education-material repo and watch this space for “summary so far / what needs doing” coming soon.
Thanks for the trial post Rob. It would be great to have some links to the materials you mentioned. (Does discourse allow that?)
Also, would be great if your WG could provide some guidance for what discussion belongs here vs. GitHub. The idea that emerged at the meeting was that many folks are hesitant to engage on GitHub and may be more comfortable here.
What sort of interactions regarding Education should we anticipate having on discourse?
@kthyng and I teach a Python for Geosciences class at Texas A&M that could be considered an intro to Pangeo. It is related to Pangeo in that we learn to plot on a map, and the ultimate data structure that we work toward is xarray. The course materials can be found here: https://github.com/kthyng/python4geosciences
@robfatland – Perhaps you can add this to your POETs list here: https://github.com/pangeo-data/education-material
We are also considering offering an advanced class, that would talk about higher level Pangeo-style issues, though this would probably also include a number of other advanced python topics in addition to core Pangeo topics.
One thing that we find would be helpful is more good homework problems, especially at the beginning of the class. It would be nice to introduce loops, simple data structures, functions and classes in a way that was less computer science oriented, but more earth science oriented. Suggestions are welcome.
Ok let me do a double response to @rabernat and @hetland.
What is in the pangeo “POETs” education repo to date?
Let’s start with four links into the pangeo education material repo:
- For “new to pangeo, what are the learning resources?” we have the learning guide: A table on the front page of the repo of what-and-where. All this material to stay should be vetted and reviewed by POETs.
- Whereas here is the POETs working group for organizing the Outreach / Education / Training activities for pangeo. This includes some draft “framing” language.
- For the leaning in new pangeo user we have the getting started sub-page initiatied by Amanda.
- For some topic-based learning the pedagogy section covers topics from the perspective of ‘Here is a minimal version of what you need to know as a pangeo community member.’
That’s the anatomy of the repo where nothing is set in stone.
What belongs here on Discourse-Education for pangeo?
Anything from tactics to strategy to existential thought; but particularly the meta-challenge: What do we need to do / build / review / create to give pangeo the "Welcome to the great game" message that I think we are going for. To that end I want to emphasize that any questions asked here are welcome and encouraged. It stays outside the more formal structure of GitHub Issues and allows us to hone in on that meta-challenge.
Contrapoint: If we have tactical issues that don’t resolve instantly: I think those are candidate conversations for GitHub. That may require some translational action from here to there; let’s just see how it goes.
Python for Geosciences and related
@hetland I added your course to the table as you suggested. Ryan has his there as well;
and this is ever the challenge in ecosystem/community building: Keeping the information
organized so it is not a wall of sound; by which I mean just too much stuff to sort through.
To that end I’ll ask for a first volunteer to go through and organize that table based on
subtopics. For example Rob’s, Ryan’s and Damien’s courses might be the three core
tutorials we choose to promote as on-ramps. Then it seems we might start breaking out
some of the other materials by domain or by method.
By the way I really dig the call for homework problems; hopefully that will turn into a fun
thing for us to contribute on.
One idea that has come up is Ryan’s notion of a book; so this is the second POETs task in addition to the first task of reviewing existing material.
Keeping this reasonably brief I’ll hit Reply now.