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Would you like to organise a coding club workshop or contribute a tutorial? we are very happy to share our tutorials! Feel free to get in touch and we can help you organise a workshop at your home institution. We would also be thrilled if you are keen to develop new tutorials! Here you can find more information about how to contribute to coding club.
We would love to extend Coding Club beyond the University of Edinburgh and create a supportive community of people keen to get better at coding and statistics! So far we have organised workshops in Edinburgh, Aberdeen and St Andrews, and we are excited for Coding Club's future adventures.
We would be thrilled to have people from anywhere in the world use our tutorials! If you would like to organise a Coding Club workshop, please get in touch at ourcodingclub(at)gmail.com and we can share our advice and experience and answer any questions you might have. The workshop can take whatever format you consider suitable: people can get together and collectively go through a given tutorial, or you can lead a workshop for your lab group or department.
There are many ways to run a coding workshop and different approaches might work better in different situations. Here is how we usually structure our workshops. The workshops take two hours and begin with a short presentation or introductory talk about what we will be doing, what skills we will acquire and what they are useful for. We then direct workshop attendants to the link for the tutorial around which the workshop is focused. People usually open the tutorial on half of their screen and RStudio (or some other IDE depending on the workshop) on the other half of their screen.
At each workshop, we have a team of demonstrators who are there to answer questions and help out. We find that it works well to let people go through the tutorial at their own pace and we usually walk around and check whether things are going well. Most of the tutorials have challenges at the end, for which we tend to split into small groups. We bring cookies, popcorn and other treats, occasionally make bad R jokes and try our best to make the atmosphere light and positive. We don't require people to sign up and there are no obligations to attend all the workshops: people can show up and leave whenever suits them, and they are free to attend whichever workshops are of interest to them. At the end of the workshops, we usually stay behind for a while in case people have any specific questions about their own coding projects.
We welcome people with all levels of R knowledge to our workshops. It's impressive how quickly people can go from never having used R before to making graphs with a bit of help! For the more advanced workshops, we usually send a link with a previous tutorial that provides the base we will build on, but we don't make completing the pre-requisites compulsory: we believe that people are free to make their own decisions and we are there to support them along the way. Sometimes people don't have time to "prepare" and that's okay - it's way better if they show up and we give them a quick intro to bring them up to speed, as opposed to them not showing up at all, because they feel intimidated by the material.
We advertise our tutorials through posters, emails and Twitter. We are happy to share the templates for our posters if you would like to customise them when organising a workshop at your home institution.
Are you keen to share some of your coding and statistics knowledge? We would love to have more people join our team and build a world-wide community of people teaching and learning together! You can take a look at the tutorials we have already developed. Feel free to make suggestions for changes on existing tutorials and get in touch with us at ourcodingclub(at)gmail.com if you would like to make a new tutorial.
We have put together a guide to contributing tutorials, where we have explained how we prepare our tutorials and how we upload them on GitHub. You can either develop a tutorial on your own or you could team up with some of your peers or us! There are no requirements on length or restrictions on topics. If you have ideas about useful coding and statistics skills and would like to share them, we can help you turn them into a tutorial. Feel free to get in touch with any questions!
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