Add blog post about teachingRSE Symposium

Author: Florian Goth

_posts/2026-01-16-teachingRSE-symposium-Dresden-2025.md

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+---
+title: "Symposium on Teaching Research Software Engineering in Germany, Dresden, 17.12-18.12.2025"
+layout: post
+author: "The TeachingRSE collaboration"
+menulang: en
+---
+
+For the last two days of the work year 2025, the [teaching RSE working
+group](https://github.com/the-teachingRSE-project) of the [deRSE
+society](https://de-rse.org/de/index.html) met in Dresden for the
+[Symposium on Teaching Research Software Engineering in
+Germany](https://the-teachingrse-project.github.io/teachingRSE-symposium/).
+The journey to Dresden was fairly straight-forward for those coming from Berlin.
+Others were not so lucky and arrived a few hours late. The people who
+arrived on time used the opportunity to drink coffee and catch up with
+various research software engineering topics.
+
+One of the discussions was about why it is so difficult to recruit helpers
+and instructors for Carpentries workshops. It seems like the usual
+candidates, PhD students, are too busy working in the labs of their
+supervisors to be able to do any teaching. In the UK, PhD
+students work on their projects which are part of the lab. However, they
+are not expected to take on any extra responsibilities in running a lab.
+This role is usually fulfilled by post-docs. This might explain why it
+appears to be more difficult to establish the carpentries in Germany.
+
+[Guido Juckeland](https://www.hzdr.de/db/!ContMan.Visi.Card?pUser=4930&pNid=5) gave the first presentation on teaching RSE at the TU
+Dresden. The course comprises typical RSE topics: shell, working in
+teams, licensing, testing and CI/CD, build systems and software
+publications. Teaching is done in lectures and practicals. The students
+first work on individual project during the first half and then on group
+projects during the second half. They use the
+[flake8](https://flake8.pycqa.org/en/latest/) python linter for marking.
+It was not surprising that genAI popped up. Fredo Erxleben was wondering
+how to ensure that the students do not overly rely on genAI for code
+generation. They did find that using genAI for test-driven development
+worked pretty well since the students have to carefully think about the
+tests so that they can prompt the LLM. We came to the conclusion that
+you cannot stop people from using genAI. However, they should be made
+aware of the various issues and be transparent about their use of the
+technology by, for example, making a declaration of AI use. One way to
+check that they understand what they did is to ask the students to give
+a presentation of their project. The team at the TU Dresden hoped that
+the students would produce reproducible jupyter notebooks. In practise,
+they stuck to the scaffolding and did not add much documentation.
+Students probably need to be guided more explicitly.
+
+Next, [Magnus Hagdorn](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5076-4864) gave a brief overview of the history of the
+[Carpentries](https://carpentries.org/) and his new role in the [Software
+Carpentry Governance
+Committee](https://software-carpentry.org/about-us/governance/). Magnus then
+gave an outlook of what is brewing in the world of the Carpentries. The
+[HPC Carpentry](https://www.hpc-carpentry.org/) course has moved into
+the incubator and is becoming part of the official curriculum. The
+course includes an intro to HPC, workflows with
+[snakemake](https://snakemake.readthedocs.io/en/stable/) and HPC python.
+The course can be easily modified to suit local HPC clusters. The
+scientific computing team at the Charité, has used the HPC course during
+their last HPC training event. The other big news is that the Carpentries
+are working on a two day AI course. In fact, the plan is to have two
+courses: one for beginners and one for proficient programmers. Both
+courses will include an introduction to the technology of LLMs and how
+they work, implications of using them and how to use them at levels
+appropriate to the target audience. Magnus also reported on the ideas to work
+on the git courses, offering github and gitlab specific material, VSCode
+and the plan to look into transitioning courses (in particular
+intermediate courses) from the incubator in the Software Carpentry
+Programme. During the discussion the [Code Refinery git
+course](https://coderefinery.github.io/git-intro/) was mentioned and
+that they use twitch live streaming for watch parties.
+
+Given the late start, we proceeded to the evening programme: a trip to
+the Christmas Market. We passed the big and famous one (the
+Striezelmarkt) and went for the one at the Frauenkirche which was a
+little bit less crowded. We tried egg glogg which tastes essentially
+like alcoholic custard sauce and had something to eat. Some of us
+found their way to an inside place with some beer. RSE
+discussions continued. We resumed the conversations in the morning at
+breakfast in the guest house.
+
+The first talk of the morning was given by
+[Katrin Schöning-Stierand](https://www.hcds.uni-hamburg.de/hcds/team/katrin-schoening-stierand.html)
+from the University of Hamburg. Katrin offers various RSE courses that are
+open to members of all faculties. During the winter semester she runs an
+introduction to python course and in the summer semester an RSE course.
+The RSE course assumes some python knowledge and also includes both
+individual and group projects. One problem she struggles with is that
+her courses are hard to find because they do not appear in the faculty
+course handbooks. At the end of the RSE course the students present
+their projects during an RSE day. This helps the students with their
+presentation skills and is good advertisement for the courses.
+
+The second talk was given by
+[Jan Philipp Thiele](https://www.tu-braunschweig.de/ub/wir-ueber-uns/ansprechpersonen-organigramm/jan-philipp-thiele)
+from the [digital science support lab of the TU Braunschweig](https://www.tu-braunschweig.de/struktur/praesidium/vp-dn/digital-science-support-lab).
+The support services are shared by the various lower saxony universities.
+Hannover focuses on AI while Braunschweig focuses on RSE. They use the live code extension
+of VSCode with some success. We had an interesting discussion on where
+central RSE units could be placed: central IT departments or libraries.
+Both deal with information so they are both good candidates. Although
+some central IT departments seem to be reluctant to take on extra
+services. Other new central RSE units are being established in Marburg
+and Frankfurt/Main.
+
+Next was [Nicholas Del Grosso](https://ibots-bonn.de/de/team/nick/)
+from the university hospital Bonn, who runs the [iBOTS](https://ibots-bonn.de/)
+open neuroscience training platform which is part of the [ibehave](https://ibehave.nrw/) network.
+They are a team of four people that develop and teach neuroscience courses. As part of their 
+course development pipeline, they evolve their courses through three stages: 
+
+1. tool-based courses, which are essentially howtos,
+2. courses that teach methods and workflows across an ecosystem of tools, and 
+3. domain specific application courses that address scientific questions, using an ecosystem of tools.
+
+The courses take the form of summer schools (2-3 weeks), online workshops
+(1-3 days), on-demand help and self-study materials. Their materials and
+web site is constructed using a custom pipeline that converts files into
+a format ready for the static website generator [Hugo](https://gohugo.io/). They did try
+[quarto](https://quarto.org/) but found it too slow for such a large project, taking around 30
+minutes to generate the entire website, and  using a popular static site generator like Hugo makes customizing
+the website with modern features much more straight-forward. Their new pipeline takes seconds to build
+the full site. In his talk, Nicholas described RSE services as another part of scientific support infrastructure,
+similar to RDM, animal welfare, library service, peer-reviewed journals, etc.
+Teaching these courses is
+difficult because the trainers are neither domain experts (they support many scientific domains and technical workflows)
+nor are they necessarily educators (they tend to have a research background, with no formal education).
+
+There is also a high turnover of staff since either their contracts run out or they find employment elsewhere. This pressurises
+course didactics. Without a scaling strategy, most single teachers addressing a group of students can handle a group of 10 to
+14 students without trouble. To scale up to larger groups, a course needs to increase the student-student
+or student-computer interactions. The iBOTS team does this by having
+regular three people break-out rooms. Participants get randomly shuffled
+which helps to ensure that preferences to work with either a proficient
+or novice practitioner can be satisfied. They also ask that at least one
+person shares their screen. This encourages participation and
+communication. During the introduction round they ask participants to
+tell the others why they are taking part in the course and what they are
+excited about which turns out to be much more effective than the teacher
+giving a motivational introduction and what to expect and get out of the
+course. This way they can handle courses with 80 participants and a
+single teacher. Feedback is gathered using following a "4L Retroscpective" session using [Miro](https://miro.com/app/dashboard/) boards.
+Miro features like Private mode (allows participants to add their own feedback without seeing what the
+others are writing) and timers (to keep everyone on-task) are very helpful for this.
+In a second round the participants are asked to group the feedback.
+
+[Julian Dehne](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9265-9619), then, gave an update of the development of an
+[RSE Master's Program](https://the-teachingrse-project.github.io/RSE-Masters/). Maja
+Toebs has looked at available scientific computing/RSE course
+descriptions and is extracting and clustering topics. There is a plan to
+pilot various courses during the next year. We had a discussion on
+whether generic RSEs are employable and what you can expect from them.
+We expect that a RSE can help break silos and build bridges between the
+various strands of research endeavours.
+
+Finally, [Florian Goth](https://www.physik.uni-wuerzburg.de/tp1/team/postdocs/dr-florian-goth/)
+introduced the [DiscoRSE](https://www.discorse.de)
+project which aims to make RSE related open educational resources more
+findable. In order to be able to do so they are looking into a metadata
+schema for standardised annotation of RSE-OERs.
+
+All participants agreed, that it was good to
+catch up in person after meeting every week virtually in the [online meetings](https://pad.gwdg.de/s/pVBQ3Sh7Z)
+of the [teachingRSE project](https://github.com/the-teachingRSE-project).
+The next opportunity to catch up in person is
+the [deRSE26](https://events.hifis.net/event/2945/) conference in
+Stuttgart.
+Presentations of the event will be shared on the
+[zenodo community](https://zenodo.org/communities/teachingrse-symposium-2025/records).