2022 NCATS Spring Coding Camp

Course Goals

The goal of the camp is to provide assisted learning in coding concepts. The camp tailors to beginner or seasoned computational experts and no previous experience is required.

At the end of this course, participants will have been introduced to GitHub and team coding best practices. Depending on their level of proficiency in programming prior to starting the camp, the expectation is for participants to have advanced their knowledge and skills in a particular language or application of software/code of their choice.

Course logistics

The Basics:

The camp will last 8 weeks and will start February 1, 2022 and go until March 22, 2022. The first session will be at 9am all other will be at 11am.
The camp will be open to all of NCATS (trainees and staff). The commitment would be 1 hour in-person time per week for 8 weeks, plus at least 3 additional hours/week and ad hoc slacking back and forth. There will be two introductory lectures: 1) introducing what the camp is about so folks can decide on whether or not to join; 2) introducing the course organization and use of GitHub, and definition of projects. At the end of the 8 weeks, everyone will share the results of their project (e.g. 15 min talk). The camp will be capped to 20 participants.

Teaching Assistants:

Each participant will be choosing a teaching assistant (TA) to work with for the entire 8 weeks. Here are the TAs for this round:

• Keith Kelleher
• Ewy Mathé
• Andy Patt
• Jaleal Sanjak
• Vishal Siramshetty
• Kyle Spencer/Cole Tindall
• Mark Williams
• Arjun Yadaw
• Tongan Zhao

For more information on the projects offered by each TA, click here.

Important note: these projects are offered as examples and are particularly useful for participants that may not have a clear idea of what they would like to work on. If participants have a data set or a clear project they would like to develop throughout this camp, we can certainly accommodate this and find a TA that matches required skills for guidance.

Working Environment:

We will rely on GitHub and Slack for communication throughout this course. Our GitHub site is: https://github.com/ncats/2022SpringCodingCamp Our Slack Channel is on the NCATS instance and is called: 2022_spring_coding_camp

Instructions on how to communicate via GitHub and Slack will be provided in the introductory lectures.

High-level timeline:

• Camp Prep: Read over project ideas, click here
• Week1 (9 am): Introduction, finalize project selection and timeline, get set up on GitHub/Slack
• Week 2: Set up your environment to complete project, finalize timeline, work on your first task
• Weeks 3-6: Keep working on tasks, revise timeline as appropriate
• Week 7/8: Final project presentation prep and presentations

Some useful links:

We've started a document to document some useful resources that related to programming. Click here to access.

Questions/Concerns?

Please contact Ewy at [email protected]