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?