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  • About
  • Schedule
  • Sessions
  • Team
  • Mechanics
  • Code of Conduct
  • Acknowledgements

Contents

  • Overview
  • What will the average seminar session look like?
  • Course Materials
    • Textbook: Version Control Book
  • Prerequisites
  • Active Learning
  • Assignments
  • Pair Programming
  • Implementation
  • Module
  • References

Mechanics

Overview

Date: Summer semester 2024 (April to July)

Event: Seminar

Time: Mondays, 12:15 - 13:45 (90 Minutes)

Credits: 4,0

Room: University of Hamburg, Von-Melle-Park 5, Room 3016

Language: English

Instructor: Dr. Lennart Wittkuhn

Tag: PsyM14-PsyWB-K04

Registration: The registration period starts on February 26th 2024 at 9:00 and ends on March 07th 2024 at 13:00. MSc Psychology students at University of Hamburg can enroll via Stine.

What will the average seminar session look like?

The course will consist of a maximum of 14 sessions, each lasting 90 minutes (for more details, refer to the schedule). Each course session follows a roughly structured format as outlined below:

  1. Content Review (up to 30 minutes):
    Course participants engage with the online materials, supplemented by concise presentations by the instructors. Some course preparation may occur outside of the class.

  2. Interactive Discussions & Quizzes (up to 15 minutes):
    Course participants collectively address any inquiries related to the session’s content and online materials. Instructor-led quiz questions may also be interspersed throughout.

  3. Exercises & Implementation (up to 60 minutes):
    Course participants actively delve into hands-on exercises and assignments.

Note, that course participants are sometimes required to work on course materials outside of class time. Not all course contents will be covered during class time.

Course Materials

Textbook: Version Control Book

Students will be asked to study specific chapters in the Version Control Book. The Version Control Book aims to summarize all the relevant course contents for the students, effectively serving as a textbook for the course. In addition, we will provide references to multiple other learning resources, allowing students to pick from those learning resources that they feel supports their learning process best.

Prerequisites

There are no prerequisites to take part in this course. Programming experience (any language) can be beneficial but is not required to follow the course contents.

Active Learning

Active learning in this class involves engaging in hands-on coding activities during class time. Research on active learning indicates that this approach promotes a greater understanding and retention of the material compared to passive teaching methods (see e.g., Deslauriers et al., 2019).

Assignments

Students will work on assignments (individually or in pairs) during class.

Pair Programming

Pair programming is a software development technique in which two programmers work together at one workstation. One, the driver, writes code while the other, the observer or navigator (Williams, 2001), reviews each line of code as it is typed in. The two programmers switch roles frequently. – Source: Wikipedia

Implementation

“For training to have an impact, students must implement what they’ve learned in their own research.” (Weissgerber, 2023)

Heise et al. (2023) outline actions that course organizers can take to prepare and support course participants in implementing what they have learned once they return to their research environment.

On this page we consider how to apply the recommendations by Heise et al. (2023) to our course in detail.

Module

This course will be offered as part of the “Psychologischer Wahlbereich” module of the M.Sc. Psychology (Research, as of WiSe 23/24) at the University of Hamburg.

The Master of Science in Psychology is a consecutive program that is strongly research-oriented. The regular period of study is 4 semesters. Teaching language is primarily English. The degree program comprises 8 modules with 2 complementary areas of concentration.

Click here to view the full module description (in German).


References

Deslauriers, L., McCarty, L. S., Miller, K., Callaghan, K., & Kestin, G. (2019). Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(39), 19251–19257. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1821936116. License: CC BY-NC-ND.
Heise, V., Holman, C., Lo, H., Lyras, E. M., Adkins, M. C., Aquino, M. R. J., Bougioukas, K. I., Bray, K. O., Gajos, M., Guo, X., Hartling, C., Huerta-Gutierrez, R., Jindrová, M., Kenney, J. P. M., Kępińska, A. P., Kneller, L., Lopez-Rodriguez, E., Mühlensiepen, F., Richards, A., … Weissgerber, T. L. (2023). Ten simple rules for implementing open and reproducible research practices after attending a training course. PLOS Computational Biology, 19(1), e1010750. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010750. License: CC BY 4.0.
Millman, K. J., Brett, M., Barnowski, R., & Poline, J.-B. (2018). Teaching computational reproducibility for neuroimaging. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2018.00727.
Weissgerber, T. L. (2023). Bridging the gap: From education to implementation. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.7974345. License: CC BY 4.0.
Williams, L. (2001). Integrating pair programming into a software development process. Proceedings 14th Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training. ’In Search of a Software Engineering Profession’ (Cat. No.PR01059). https://doi.org/10.1109/csee.2001.913816. License: Unknown.
Wilson, R. C. (2021). NSCS 344 — modeling the mind. University of Arizona. https://u.arizona.edu/~bob/web_NSCS344/. License: Unknown.
© 2023 – 2025 Dr. Lennart Wittkuhn
  • Acknowledgements
License: CC BY 4.0