Lesson Infrastructure

Overview

Teaching: 60 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• What are the tools required to develop lessons in The Carpentries?

• What is the structure of a Carpentries lesson repository?

Objectives

• Navigate the directory structure of a lesson repository.

• Adjust the global configuration of a lesson.

• Write formatted text with Markdown.

Reading List

• CDH Chapter 8: Technological Introductions.
• Section A.2 of CDH Appendix A: The Carpentries Incubator.

Discussion Prompts

• What questions do you have after setting up/trying to set up your lesson repository?
• What was confusing about the process?
• What are some of the potential benefits of your lesson being listed on the Community Developed Lessons page at this early stage of development?
• What are some of the potential downsides of this?
• What topics did you choose to add to your lesson repository? Did you use a strategy to decide what these topics should be?

Homework Tasks

Note for groups of participants collaborating on a single lesson: ALL: a task to be done by all collaborators on a lesson; ONE: a task to be done by only one participant per lesson, ideally after discussion with their collaborators.

• (ALL) Read the Working with Learning Objectives section of The Carpentries Instructor Training Curriculum.
• (ALL) Read the Learning Objectives section of Teaching Tech Together.
• (ALL) Read the Concept Maps and Seven Plus or Minus Two sections of Teaching Tech Together.
• (ALL) In your Lesson Design Notes, write 2-5 learning objectives for your lesson.
• (ALL) Create at least one episode file in your lesson repository and add 2-4 learning objectives in the objectives field for that episode.
• (ALL, optional but recommended) Set up your computer to build lesson pages locally.
  • Note: setting up a local installation of Jekyll is often not straightforward, but is important to ensure you can make good progress with the development of your lesson. If you run into trouble when following the instructions linked above, please post to the lesson-development Slack channel, create an issue on your lesson repository and mention @tobyhodges, email Toby directly, or attend one of the Lesson Template Helpdesk sessions.

Key Points

• The Carpentries lessons use a shared lesson template to provide aesthetic and structural consistency across all lessons.

• Lesson pages are written with Markdown and/or RMarkdown, built with Jekyll, and served via GitHub Pages.

• The global configuration of a lesson site is set in the _config.yml file.

• Supporting files are stored both in _extras/ and the root of directory of the repository.