Making the workshop interactive
Start with an ice breaker
Begin the workshop with an exercise that forces participants to converse with their neighbours.
Reproducibility Ice Breaker Example:
Set a timer for 3 minutes.
Tell the participants to create a line across the room in order of how recently they coded for research.
Participants need to speak to one another to establish where they fit in the chronological line.
Invite those with more coding experience to support those with less during the workshop exercises.
Minimize the time spent lecturing
Provide participants with basic background and definitions to ensure they are building their learning upon a correct foundation.
Beyond that foundation, minimize lecturing and theory. Instead, introduce curated resources that allow participants to dive into theory themselves.
Prioritize hands-on learning and exercises that take advantage of being in the same room as the participants.
Establish a communication system
Design a communication system for participants that allows them to signal questions and problems passively.
Reproducibility Communication System Example:
Bring enough green and pink post-it notes for each participant to have one of each.
At the beginning of each exercise, request that each participant place the pink post-it on their laptop.
Participants switch the pink post-it to a green post-it when they complete the exercise.
This allows people encountering problems to communicate their issues passively, ensuring that shy participants are not left behind.
Provide safe opportunities for interaction
Include opportunities for participants to share experiences and feedback during the workshop. Ensure these opportunities are well structured and focus on low-risk questions to allow all participants to equally participate. Low-risk questions are questions that avoid sensitive or divisive topics and for which any answer is equally valued by the audience and all answers are unlikely to include value judgements.
Reproducibility Interactive Question Examples:
Have you ever had difficulties reproducing the work of another researcher? Yes or No?
Have you ever had difficulties producing your own work on a later date? Yes or No?
What language do you use most frequently for your research?
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