Summary and Setup

Workshop Prerequisites

Participants should be familiar with how to write formatted text (bold, italic, bullet point lists, etc) with Markdown, and the fundamentals of git for version control (add, commit, push, pull, remotes). Some familiarity with an integrated development environment, especially RStudio, would be particularly beneficial.

In this workshop, participants will explore the ecosystem of processes, resources, and infrastructure that supports lesson development in The Carpentries community. The first part of the workshop will provide participants with some steps to follow to help them design and develop a high-quality lesson. In the second part, participants will be able to follow an interactive demonstration of the key features of The Carpentries Workbench, and discover how they can use the infrastructure to create their own lesson websites.

The target audience for this workshop is RSEs who provide training as part of their role or in a voluntary capacity (e.g. as an Instructor with The Carpentries). It will be especially relevant to RSEs who wish to develop an open source lesson using the approaches and infrastructure presented in the session.

To follow the workshop, participants will need to bring a laptop with a working installation of RStudio and R version 4.1 or higher. (To download and install R, follow the link to https://www.r-project.org/, follow the “CRAN” link near the top-left of that page, and choose a mirror close to your location.)

Participants will also need a GitHub account with credentials set up to enable pushing changes to GitHub. Choose one of the following two options for these credentials:

  1. SSH keys - the Software Carpentry Version Control with Git lesson includes a guide for how to set up SSH keys for connecting to GitHub
  2. a personal access token - Happy Git with R provides a guide for how to set up an access token for GitHub with R