Kasia Banas
Sessions
Pair programming is a collaboration technique widely used in the software industry – it involves two people working together on one programming task. One person is the driver, suggesting solutions and typing the code; the other person is the navigator, helping with problem-solving and spotting mistakes. After a short time, they swap roles.
Pair programming can improve the reproducibility of your own data analysis. It is also useful in teaching - it makes data analysis and statistics courses more interactive, and also more scalable (students help each other first, before coming to the instructor for help).
In this interactive workshop, we will give you a taste of pair programming, with tasks in R, Python and Excel. You will be paired with another person and given a set of small challenges to solve together. You will practice both pair programming roles and you will get a chance to reflect on your experience.
We will use this session to discuss how we teach programming and related skills to our students who likely did not choose to study Psychology in order to learn how to code or do statistics. We believe that even though those students did not arrive at university with the expectation of becoming programmers, we have the opportunity to instil enthusiasm by teaching with joy and kindness. Since students are the researchers of tomorrow, equipping them with these skills will improve the quality and reproducibility of Psychological science in the long term. We will be looking for your case studies, stories, tips and tricks, experiences, metaphors, and materials.
The organizers are writing an edited book around "Teaching Programming Across Disciplines"
[ https://pairprogramming.ed.ac.uk/book/ ]. If participants would like to keep working on their contributions after SIPS, their output could become a chapter for this book.