Hack Day 2024#
Overview#
The AstroCodEx team hosted a one-day “Hack Day Conference” at Yale University focused on building high-quality, classroom-ready coding exercises for astronomy and astrophysics education. The goal of the event was to bring together educators (faculty, lecturers, postdocs, and graduate students) who teach research skills to collaboratively develop a shared repository of exercises that use real astronomical data and techniques.
We aimed to create exercises that can be slotted into research methods courses or incorporated into topical astronomy courses. The day also included structured discussions about pedagogy and community-building for this kind of educational resource, including a keynote talk by Daniel Anglés-Alcázar.
The event took place on Friday, May 31, 2024, at Yale University (Kline Tower).
Location: Kline Tower, Yale University
219 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT 06511
Registration: Registration is now closed.
(For the 2024 event, registration was free, and limited travel support was available for bus/train travel.)
Questions?
For the 2024 event, questions were directed to: imad.pasha@yale.edu
A Hack Day Conference#
The goal of this “hack day conference” (HDC) is to bring together educators (e.g., faculty, lecturers, postdocs, grad students) who often find themselves in the position of teaching research skills (namely, coding skills). Together, we aim to create a high quality set of exercises which leverage astronomical data and techniques, while teaching critical coding skills students will need in research projects. We envision such a repository being useful for anyone attempting to develop new curricula, with exercises designed to be slotted into relevant research methods courses or sprinkled in topical classes. We’ll also have discussions surrounding this form of pedagogy, with a keynote talk from Daniel Anglés-Alcázar.
Registration is free, and we have funding available to help cover the cost of travel (e.g., bus/train tickets). The registration deadline is May 10, 2024. Note that due to limited space, registration is not a guarantee for attendance; organizers will reach out to registrants as soon as possible after submission with confirmation of selection.
How it works#
This HDC will be a blend of several event types you may be familiar with:
A hack day, in which attendees actively work on material and content (in this case, educational exercises)
An un-conference, in which attendees discuss broad and specific challenges and successes in a given subfield (here, that of research-methods pedagogy)
A collaboration meeting, in which a more tight-knit group discusses the vision and logistical organization of a collaboration
A journal-style submission process, in which content is peer-reviewed and modified with feedback before acceptence into a corpus
The end result we hope for is two-fold:
An initial repository of peer-reviewed, high quality exercises covering a range of coding and astrophysical topics
An initial collaboration of individuals, willing to help moderate and build upon that respository
We ask attendees to bring a favorite dataset or idea for a set of exercises. Everyone will get immediate feedback and ideas along the way. Like many hack-day style events, attendees are also welcome to jump on a different idea than the one they brought.
We aim to utilize peer review / active feedback – something most of us don’t get when designing pedagogical materials – along with some key technological assets, such as automatic tests for exercises to keep them up to date as codebases change, to make a resource educators will find it beneficial to both pull from and contribute to.
We especially hope to make such a resource living; that is, as exercises are used in the classroom, updates, corrections, and improvements can be implemented via a pull-request style framework.
Goals for the day#
By the end of the event, we hoped to achieve two outcomes:
An initial set of peer-reviewed, high-quality exercises spanning coding and astrophysical topics
An initial collaboration of contributors who are interested in helping build, moderate, and sustain the repository
Participants were encouraged to bring a favorite dataset or an idea for an exercise. Attendees could also choose to join a different project than the one they arrived with, and everyone received feedback throughout the day.
We also discussed ways to support the repository as a living resource—where exercises can be updated, corrected, and improved over time as they are used in real classrooms—using a pull-request style workflow and tools such as automated tests.
Organizers#
Imad Pasha (NSF Graduate Research Fellow, Yale University)
Malena Rice (Assistant Professor, Yale University)
Advisory Committee#
Priya Natarajan (Professor, Yale University)
Meg Urry (Professor, Yale University)
Marla Geha (Professor, Yale University)
Earl Bellinger (Assistant Professor, Yale University)
Charles Bailyn (Professor, Yale University)
Schedule#
This event took place on May 31, 2024 at Yale University and was hosted in Kline Tower.
Preliminary schedule:
09:00 AM — Introduction and Coffee
09:20 AM — Keynote Address: Daniel Anglés-Alcázar (University of Connecticut)
10:00 AM — Overview of Jupyter + MyST tools
10:30 AM — Hack Session I (grouped by topic)
12:30 PM — Lunch Break
01:30 PM — Group discussion on Hack Session I
02:00 PM — Peer Review Period (trade exercises, attempt, and give comments)
03:00 PM — Hack Session II (building on feedback and comments)
04:00 PM — Group discussion on Hack Session II
04:30 PM — Group discussion: ideas for the maintenance, distribution, and classroom use of AstroCodEx
05:30 PM — End of event
Keynote Speaker#
Daniel Anglés-Alcázar (University of Connecticut)#
Daniel Anglés-Alcázar served as the keynote speaker for the 2024 Hack Day Conference.
Daniel is an astrophysicist at the University of Connecticut. He obtained his PhD from the University of Arizona, and carried out a postdoc at Northwestern/Ciera, followed by a stint as a Flatiron Research Fellow at the Flatiron Center for Computational Astrophysics before he became an assistant professor at UConn. In 2023, Daniel was awarded a Cottrell Scholarship, which honors and helps to develop outstanding teacher-scholars who are recognized by their scientific communities for the quality and innovation of their research programs and their potential for academic leadership. Daniel’s Cottrell Program fits strongly within the Astrocodex mission, with a goal of creating “a multi-component educational program aimed at increasing the retention and success of students from underrepresented groups in the Physical Sciences, including a redesign of graduate and undergraduate courses in Computational Physics to incorporate more effective active learning approaches that can help reduce achievement gaps and offer disproportionate benefits for minority students, and an undergraduate program that will provide mentoring and financial support for students from underrepresented groups in STEM to participate in semester-long data visualization projects using Python programming tools.”
Code of Conduct#
The 2024 event operated under the American Astronomical Society Code of Conduct: https://aas.org/policies/ethics
All participants were required upon registration to agree to abide by this code of conduct. The organizers were committed to maintaining a welcoming and inclusive environment. Concerns could be brought to the organizers (Imad Pasha and Malena Rice).
FAQ#
What programming languages can I use?
The long-term vision for AstroCodEx includes expanding beyond Python to other languages commonly used in astronomy (e.g., C/C++, Fortran, possibly Julia). For the 2024 event, the focus was on Python to keep the peer review process smooth and accessible.Can I participate as an undergraduate?
The event was primarily intended for participants serving in an explicit educational role and involved in creating or administering course content. Undergraduate participation was considered on a case-by-case basis via the application process.How much travel funding was available?
Limited travel support was available for expenses such as gas and bus/train tickets (airline travel was not supported). The amount depended on demand and costs, with an expected range of approximately \(100–\)200 per person for those who indicated need on the registration form.