Essential Scientific Computing for Environmental Scientists 3
Lead Research Organisation:
UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
Abstract
Good Scientific Computing and Data Management skills are increasingly important in all disciplines of science, but are rarely taught at undergraduate level to environmental scientists, and students in related domains. This leads to a significant knowledge gap, limiting their ability to work effectively with both data and code which inevitably has a direct impact on the science outputs they are able to produce. It also leads to disparity between researchers in different domains, where these skills are often now taught as mandatory elements in physical science undergraduate degrees.
We have significant collective experience in teaching good practices around programming, including testing data analysis, management, and visualisation, and knowledge across a wide spectrum of the NERC domain. We are therefore well placed to provide relevant and engaging courses to researchers who have no experience of programming, and to those who have had some previous exposure to scientific computing, and we will run courses that will appeal to both of these groups. Our plan to run both in-person and online courses, as well as providing appropriate funding, will help attract attendance from groups who traditionally find it difficult to attend multi-day in-person courses.
The courses we provide will be fully interactive, with attendees working along with the instructor in real time for the taught components of the lessons. There will be regular exercises for the attendees to have time to consolidate the material, with a high ratio of demonstrators to attendees to ensure that there is sufficient support for those who find the concepts more difficult. Materials for the exercises is domain specific, helping to mitigate against the issue that many non-domain specific training courses have that content appears too abstract, and attendees find it difficult to learn both new concepts and how to align it to their own work.
Increasing computing and numeracy literacy amongst PhD students and early-career researchers will not only help with their own research, but they are highly transferable skills and will be extremely valuable regardless of their long-term career ambitions. We hope that it will also lead to other students being encouraged to increase their own skills, thereby improving the overall levels of scientific computing skill within the environmental disciplines.
From our own collaborations, we know that this type of training is in high demand in academic, NGO, and public sector institutions and so we will advertise these courses widely to ensure maximum visibility and take-up. We will use our own experiences and lessons learned from running previous courses (e.g. from those run under the ARCHER, Ed-DASH, and SSI grants, which have collectively taught in excess of 5000 students) to guide good practice, and take on board continual feedback to make sure the courses continue to be as useful as possible throughout the timeframe of the grant. From the courses we ran under our previous grants (Essential Scientific Computing for Environmental Scientists: NE/X009211/1 and Essential Scientific Computing for Environmental Scientists 2: NE/Y003799/1), we have received valuable feedback which has enabled us to enhance the content further for the intended audience. Following the success of the Bring Your Own Data day to three of the in-person courses, to provide more focussed support for a small number of attendees with their own research, we will continue to offer these.
We have significant collective experience in teaching good practices around programming, including testing data analysis, management, and visualisation, and knowledge across a wide spectrum of the NERC domain. We are therefore well placed to provide relevant and engaging courses to researchers who have no experience of programming, and to those who have had some previous exposure to scientific computing, and we will run courses that will appeal to both of these groups. Our plan to run both in-person and online courses, as well as providing appropriate funding, will help attract attendance from groups who traditionally find it difficult to attend multi-day in-person courses.
The courses we provide will be fully interactive, with attendees working along with the instructor in real time for the taught components of the lessons. There will be regular exercises for the attendees to have time to consolidate the material, with a high ratio of demonstrators to attendees to ensure that there is sufficient support for those who find the concepts more difficult. Materials for the exercises is domain specific, helping to mitigate against the issue that many non-domain specific training courses have that content appears too abstract, and attendees find it difficult to learn both new concepts and how to align it to their own work.
Increasing computing and numeracy literacy amongst PhD students and early-career researchers will not only help with their own research, but they are highly transferable skills and will be extremely valuable regardless of their long-term career ambitions. We hope that it will also lead to other students being encouraged to increase their own skills, thereby improving the overall levels of scientific computing skill within the environmental disciplines.
From our own collaborations, we know that this type of training is in high demand in academic, NGO, and public sector institutions and so we will advertise these courses widely to ensure maximum visibility and take-up. We will use our own experiences and lessons learned from running previous courses (e.g. from those run under the ARCHER, Ed-DASH, and SSI grants, which have collectively taught in excess of 5000 students) to guide good practice, and take on board continual feedback to make sure the courses continue to be as useful as possible throughout the timeframe of the grant. From the courses we ran under our previous grants (Essential Scientific Computing for Environmental Scientists: NE/X009211/1 and Essential Scientific Computing for Environmental Scientists 2: NE/Y003799/1), we have received valuable feedback which has enabled us to enhance the content further for the intended audience. Following the success of the Bring Your Own Data day to three of the in-person courses, to provide more focussed support for a small number of attendees with their own research, we will continue to offer these.