CW21 Hack Day - 2021-03-31 to 2021-04-01

Cave-Brown-Cave-1916 - HP5-CW21

Hack Day idea proposer

Idea name (provisional)

Escape room: Translating between RSEs and Arts & Humanities Researchers (Part 1)

Hack Day Demo

Context and/or research domain

Software development for research in the Arts and Humanities

Problem

Researchers in the Arts & Humanities can benefit greatly from research software, but often don’t have the kind of background in formally-structured design that a physicist or engineer does. This can make developing research software for them challenging- particularly when A&H problems are often defined in ways that are very different from how computational problems are defined.

We want to help researchers in A&H and RSEs to communicate better, so that they can collaborate on building research software more easily.

Using gamified versions of boring and dry training materials for software development, we want to make learning about software development fun and accessible.

Solution

Virtual escape room: Solve a set of connected puzzles to escape the virtual game room. In the course of solving the puzzles, the participants will learn key concepts from research software development.

Our pitch: develop the Part 1 of this escape room series:

Theme: Gamified activities to learn the meaning of common jargon words. E.g. API, Object, function, Sprint, version, Agile, automation

The escape room will be themed around learning to translate an alien language (Software development) expressed in an unusual way, so that the unfamiliar concepts can be understood in the context of our work. For example: which of these flow diagrams is the correct one? What analogy of a RSE concept can we find in humanities?

  • Format: Online, can use existing websites or a GitHub repository with questions and clues to find information. Learning journey.
  • **Aim: **The aim is to encourage participants to look for information and find out resources about software development practices and RSE related concepts themselves as they find answers to solve the puzzles.
  • Outcome of the escape room activity: participants are familiar with 4 concepts/jargon words usually used by software developers. Participants are now in a better position to work/interact with Research Software Engineers- or to go on and learn to become digital humanities developers themselves.

Potential topics and set of activities for escape rooms for part 2 onwards (not proposed for this pitch, but idea for future collaboration):

  1. Set a repo to teach GitHub / version control (create with long history, ask people to find who did what, and on what days)
  2. Give a project goal that required chunking down one goal into different tasks and create clues (Agile development)
  3. Create puzzles to teach reproducibility
  4. Use interesting data table to teach about dataframe and coding using pandas
  5. Use a visualization tool or shiny app to solve different puzzles

Diagrams / illustrations

(Copyright: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0, source: https://wireframe.raspberrypi.org/articles/out-now-pythonesque-anarchy-in-wireframe-16)

Some ideas