Thoughts from day 1 (notebooks 00-06 + GP1) #4
Description
Notes from 2025 teaching - day 1.
General point for all:
Reminder to make sure to clear, save, commit and push all changes to notebooks in advance! (Some differences between repo and what is presented, e.g., cells with answers already run?).
00-showcase:
- Feel maybe too much detail on xarray, could be better to just show the nice figures that can be produced, without trying to explain any detail?
- Also rather than focus on netcdf, could show an alternative pandas/csv example?
02: notebooks:
Suggest at the start of this session there should be a dedicated time to ensure everyone has notebooks open - then have the exercises halfway through. Maybe something to include at end of 01 - how to run?
- does this go into more detail than is actually needed? Main message should be how to run the code during the course. Do we need to know all the detail about markdown?
- Feel it would be better to spend less time on this, and then introduce more hands on exercises earlier on? (We have people spending a long time listening to lecturers before starting to play with code)
04: semantics:
Be careful to explain difference between a method and function.
Took longer than planned (split before/after lunch). Should this be streamlined knowing that everything will be covered in more depth later?? e.g., don't need to explain lists, dict etc. here as covered in data structures later.
05: scalar types
Worth adding a note on exampled use of complex numbers?
Add note to string indexing that indexing will be covered in more detail later (with lists).
06: data structures
Indexing is fundamental to a lot of later courses, so important to make sure this is understood.
Walk round class to see who is lost/struggling during Ex2.1?
Suggest list comprehension be moved to be included after the for loop section, in notebook 07?
Ex4.1 already had solution included!
GP1:
Nice to have freedom, but most people working through suggested exercise, so maybe safe to keep with that in future?