I just ran a Software Carpentry Introduction to R Programming workshop with Sofia Melendez for the IQ-Bio-REU. We had three great helpers, Briknie Baez, Israel Dilán, and Marc De Jesus Ellsworth. With Juan S Ramirez lending moral support as needed. We ran the workshop over 5 half-days instead of the usual two full-day workshops. This format was good for the instructors, and I think for the participants too, it gives some time for the lessons to sink in, although most days the REU had other seminars in the mornings. We had 10 undergraduates from the IQ-Bio-REU, one from the NeuroID program, and a couple of graduate students participate.
The course material is up on the site, we followed the unix shell-novice, git-novice, and r-novice-inflammation lessons, and added the ggplot2 lesson from the r-novice-gapminder on Friday.
The participants were pretty enthusiastic, and most followed along with some help from the helpers. Here is some of the feedback we got from the second day of R. Yellow stickies are positive comments "one good thing from today's workshop", and "red" stickies are "one confusing thing from today's workshop".
The pre- and post-workshop surveys we did seem to indicate we are doing something right. In response to "I can write a small program/script/macro to solve a problem in my own work." the pre-workshop survey results had showed 46% of learners strongly disagreed with that statement, 23% agree, and 0% strongly agree. Post-workshop those numbers changed to 14% strongly disagree, 43% agree, and 29% strongly agree. I encourage all the participants to continue practicing their data science skills, and I hope they enjoy their summer.