Posts in teaching
Kickstart 2023 wrap-up and thoughts for the future
- 2024 Feb 15
Our kickstart course came and went with very few problems. This post summarizes our general thoughts on the course and its format.
If you want to join the course next year (as an attendee, or as an organization who will send your learners to us (and maybe co-teach) follow us on Mastodon. This is the third year we’ve done the livestream format, and it’s not likely to stop anytime soon.
This was originally written in June 2023 but publication was forgotten until 2024.
The course has run since around 2015 or so. Until mid 2020, it was always in-person only. Until (and including) 2022, it ran twice a year, January and June, but now it runs only in June (increased availability of videos + the material compensates). It runs in June so that it aligns with new summer research interns starting. Until around 2020, it was mostly about using the HPC cluster at Aalto University, but since then there has been more emphasis on day 1 covering generic skills needed for scientific computing and the big picture of things.
Our general feedback remains quite positive. Our streaming + coteaching + collaborative notes format is still well received, and there seems to be little reason to go back for courses of smaller scale. Instead of just lectures, written material (tutorials in info on scicomp.aalto.fi) + livestream + videos is a good combination.
There is never enough time - not much else to say. Each year there is a different trade-off between how much we cover and how brief we are. (There are always people who say we should go more in-depth, and some who say we go too much in-depth. Such is life.)
Repetition is good, but not when it’s a sign that we can’t stop talking and keep saying the same thing over and over. The best lessons seemed to be the ones that were taught most quickly, since it has a high density of new information. We should strive to make more lessons faster, and leave details to the reading.
Because the teachers also do support, for anything difficult, we can easily tell learners: “Do what you can, come by our SciComp garage to ask for help with anything else. This overall reduces the demands from teaching: a person doesn’t have to know everything, but know enough to get started and to know when they may need more help for more advanced tools. This really is good for both of us.
As usual, we expected our learners to read our shell crash course in advance. We also had a new tutorial on using the cluster from the shell. This helped some, but it was still a problem.
Reflection: this will always be a problem in any course that has a wide enough audience. We should accept and provide positive support for those not ready, and not try to exclude them. It’s OK to see a course and then strive to get the prerequisites later.
Internally, we had this thought of dividing the course in two: a basic part at the start of the summer, and an advanced part at the end of the summer - since brand new researchers may have trouble understanding everything. On the other hand, the fact we have videos means that people can come back and review the material when they are ready. So in some sense, learners can divide the course however they would like by stopping when they think it’s no longer necessary and coming back. This could be mentioned more explicitly in our introductions.
Attendance goes down day-by-day. This is definitely OK - it doesn’t hurt anyone. It’s expected that day 1 was suitable for the most people (even those not doing HPC work), and then the course topics got continually more specific as we went further and further.
As mentioned above, this is even be expected and encouraged - better to have someone attend day 1, than not.
Our exercises are quite basic overall, but we got few complains about this. Basic exercises are better than something too advanced or realistic, that requires many things to come together.
This year, we tried to have a complete solution for every exercise (script and/or commands), even if it’s directly said above in the lesson. This seemed to be good, since for people very short of time, they still have some chance to copy and paste and do the exercises. For those passively following, they can at least see what would have been done.
Day 3 / end of course feedback positive feedback (o is the way a
person votes for/agrees with that option:
it’s great that the material is so easily accessible also after the course to go through things in my own pace again oo
Really good format with the streaming and the shared document for questions. ooooo
The cat kept me focused in the lecture
Live interaction with the instructes were very helpful and exercises were nice
I really appreaciate the instructors took the time to explain the jargons, instead of just letting them fly around. o
The fact that the instructors were really nice contributed to the good course experience. Thanks for that! o
(day 1) After studying remotely for 1,5 year and having lots of online classes, I highly appreciate the amazing audio quality here. Many thanks for that!
(day 1) The framework is better than any other workshop I’ve ever attended - in terms of interaction and audio quality. HackMD is great.
(day 1) The (twitch) vertical screen thing is genius and should be used in way more (online) lectures o
Most common negative feedback: not enough time! In fact, that’s almost only thing to improve. Except we can’t, so I think we win pretty well. And videos/material allows follow-up.
How we did summer kickstart 2021
SciComp Kickstart - 2023 plans and yearly strategy
- 2023 Apr 26
It’s time for our “kickstart course” - let’s talk about what that is, why, and why you might want to attend.
The full name is “Introduction to scientific computing and HPC” (high-performance computing), and it used to be called “HPC Kickstart” and was taught without the first day, thus the short name “kickstart” we still use. Some years day 1 had a different name, but was still taught together with days 2-3 as a package.
Our goal isn’t just to teach some skills, but to form a community around scientific computing - with researchers who have a common language to work together and help each other, supported by Aalto Scientific Computing in the background.
Day 1 is not about high-performance computing things, but the basic skills needed to do scientific computing: things like Linux usage, data management, the types of tools available for different problems. For almost anyone doing any kind of programming/scientific computing kind of work, regardless of background. These kind of skills aren’t taught in academic degree programs. We teach these on day 1 because otherwise, new researchers have to learn from each other or re-invent.
Days 2 and 3 are about high-performance computing, more precisely basic cluster usage (with a focus of the basics). This is focused on the kinds of tools our community usually uses.
The topics are refined after many years of both teaching and support of junior researchers. Because of the way academic careers work (much diversity of paths), these topics (even day 1) aren’t just for new researchers but everyone can find something to learn or brush up on.
For the past years, we have been trying to keep up this yearly summer schedule. This usually happens the first full workweek:
Monday: HR introductions, other formalities for new summer workers - many departments seem to something like this. This may happen early than Monday of the kickstart week, since sometimes that comes too late.
Tuesday afternoon: Kickstart course day 1, the general scientific computing introduction. Applicable to everyone doing scientific computing.
Wednesday-Thursday afternoons: The HPC cluster usage part, which fewer people will attend compared to Tuesday.
Friday: we don’t have scheduled programs on Fridays, but sometimes there are communities who host advanced tutorials here about what their local users need. In 2023, there is at least an advanced GPU course then.
We are aware that there is a scheduling conflict with the CS summer day which is scheduled on the Tuesday of the 2023 HPC kickstart course. We did contact every department in January/February, yet this was still a surprise to us. In past years, we have adjusted our schedule to similar events, but this is not possible this year despite our best efforts.
We will still try to support researchers as much as possible. Recordings of previous years are available on youtube, and we also release videos the same evening as the course precisely to support everyone regardless of these conflicts. Researchers can still join us for day 2 and 3 even if you did not join day 1. However, please pay particular care to the instructions about setting up the Triton connection in advance.
We hope that this blog post can explain our goals to a larger audience so that we can reach even more people in the future, so that we can expand to onboarding even more young researchers even more systematically. You can reach us at scip@aalto.fi, and each spring we reach out to the main departments to schedule each summer’s course.