An introduction to this lesson

Overview

Teaching: 15 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• What do we need a template for?

Objectives

• Edit lesson materials in the template

• Contribute fixes through Github PRs

• Use the template to create your own lesson

ReproNim is open

The ReproNim event can only accommodate a limited number of participants. Nevertheless, we are committed to openness and we are committed to providing our materials in an open format, through a publicly accessible website.

Using a template allows to create websites for each of the lectures

To enable access to the materials in an open format, but allow different instructors freedom in constructing their own materials, we provide a template (you’re looking at it!), that can be relatively easily adapted to create lesson materials for many different lessons

To create a new lesson out of the template

Template lesson files are markdown files

• They are in the _episodes folder.
• They are named sequentially:
  • 01-first-part.md
  • 02-second-part.md
  • etc

Markdown format allows you to create nice web-pages

And with only a really small amount of effort! It’s text based, so you can write exactly what you intend to say.

If you want to introduce a block of code into your lesson, write a block fenced by triple-tilde. Here is an example of that

import nibabel as nib
img = nib.load('my_file.nii.gz')
affine = img.affine

Images can be embedded into the lesson plan, by using the following syntax:

To embed images, you will also want to copy the image file into the fig folder of the repository, and add that.

Exercises and challenges (click on the arrow to the right to open)

Boxes with “challenges” can be interleaved with the lesson materials. Consider adding a challenge every 15 minutes or so.

• This helps participants stay engaged.
• It surfaces questions that learners have as they go along.
• It breaks up the instruction, providing a bit of a diversion.
• It gives people a chance to engage in peer instruction, which is is known to help learning.

Callouts

If you want to introduce a box with a “callout”, use this syntax This is useful for materials that you think of as explanatory asides I usually use this for extra material that is “optional”.

Key Points

• We want to use this template to provide lesson materials in an open and useful format.

• This is in line with our overall goal of making science (including scientific training) more open.