Teaching Digital Literacy - From Python Notebooks to Packages

Today most research involves some form of collecting and processing data using digital computers. However, digital literacy courses are missing from many programmes of study. In particular, many students of non-MINT subjects, such as for example medicine, lack digital skills required for modern research.

In this presentation I am going to describe the Digital Literacy Course of the SpaceMed Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree on Physiology and Medicine of Humans in Space and Extreme Environments. The course covers technical aspects such as using the Unix shell and git, and an introduction to python. It also covers research software engineering aspects such as collaboration, testing, CI/CD and software publishing. The technical skills are taught using data sets relevant to the students' subject.

The students initially learn how to program python and develop algorithms using notebooks. The reusable parts of the notebooks are extracted as functions and moved to a python package. The tools are not just taught but the students have to use them as part of their work. During each session, the students work on a new feature branch which gets submitted to their gitlab project after each session. Feedback is given using gitlab functionality. The gitlab groups and projects are managed using a set of python scripts. These scripts are publicly available. I will describe in detail how you can move from a python notebook to a publishable python package.