Software Carpentry

The warmup tutorials for our grassroots Software Carpentry course started this week, and we’d like to send a “thank you” to Jamie Winter at The MathWorks, who has provided students with temporary licenses for MATLAB. It’s all been very last minute, and we’re grateful to Jamie for pulling this off on such short notice.

After a lot of hard work from Dominique and Jon, we’re kicking off warmup tutorials for Software Carpentry this week. 65 students from Psychology, Linguistics, Chemical Engineering, and a couple of other departments will get three weeks of review on basic programming, then start the regular material in January. Our thanks to MITACS, the MathWorks, SciNet, and DCS for their support.

Steve Eddins has posted an xUnit-style testing harness for MATLAB called MTEST on the MATLAB Central File Exchange.  It’s a nice piece of work, and I hope numerical programmers will make heavy use of it.

While we’re running our survey of how scientists use computers, the folks at MATLAB are asking their users a few questions too.  If you use any MathWorks products, and have a few minutes, they’d be grateful for your help.

I got word earlier this week that The MathWorks (makers of MATLAB) had approved my request for funding to spruce up the Software Carpentry notes, and find out how scientists are actually using computers. I faxed a signed copy of the paperwork down to them today—with luck, work will start in a couple of weeks, and I’m very excited to have a chance to work with the NRC’s Janice Singer on the survey.  And since students (graduate and undergraduate alike) occasionally ask about how academic funding works, the text of the proposal is below the cut. It isn’t quite the same as programming, but in the end it might be more useful…
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Everyone’s making good progress:

• Ming and Bing have posted their second demo — next step is to do some serious design of the final product.
• After correcting an earlier post of mine, Xuan has blogged a fuller description of what she and Edward are building.
• Zeev Lieber posted a brief summary of what Dmitri and William did last term. Dmitri’s still wrestling with GWT exceptions.
• Jeff Balogh shortens his build.
• Matthew Basset sent his first data.
• Joseph Yeung is converting an EXE to an MMC.
• Victoria Mui completes a subtask.
• Daniel Servos likes Moodle plugins.
• Qiyu Zhu can edit roles.
• Nick Jamil provides more details.
• Qi Yang bursts into song.

Oh, and it looks like I’m going to get a grant from The MathWorks to upgrade the Software Carpentry course and find out what scientists are actually doing with computers — more on that once I know whether Sadie and I have bought a house or not.