Our history with The Carpentries
The Institute became involved with what was then Software Carpentry (now a lesson programme within The Carpentries) in 2011 by developing online lectures in advanced shell tricks and systems programming in Python. In April 2012, we participated in the first UK Carpentry workshop, led by the Software Carpentry's creator, Greg Wilson, at the University College London. A fortnight later, in conjunction with the Digital Institute at Newcastle University and SoundSoftware, we delivered the first workshop run entirely by UK instructors, independent of Greg Wilson's team.
We have since been involved in a large number of workshops run in the UK and helped to deliver workshops worldwide. In February 2013, we volunteered to coordinate Software Carpentry activities in the UK. In early 2015, soon after the set up of the Organisational Membership scheme, we became a Software Carpentry Foundation Partner, a partnership which has now moved to The Carpentries. We inspired and helped many UK organisations and groups to start delivering Carpentry workshops and explore their individual partnerships with The Carpentries.
The Institute organised the UK’s first Data Carpentry workshop in November 2014 at the University of Manchester. In 2015, we started helping Greg Wilson run Instructor Training to train new cohorts of Carpentry instructors and increase the size of community. Since then, we have taught at 25 Instructor Training events and helped train over 500 instructors in the UK and worldwide. More recently, in 2022, together we The Carpentries we developed and piloted a new Collaborative Lesson Development Training curriculum, teaching good practices in lesson design and development and open source collaboration skills, using The Carpentries Workbench lesson template. In 2023, with The Carpentries we co-developed Lesson Developer Trainer Training - a curriculum for training Carpentries Lesson Developer Trainers, preparing them to teach Collaborative Lesson Development Training.
