CNG Education Working Group meeting 2025-08-06

A bi-weekly meeting of the CNG Education Working Group

Author

The CNG Education Working Group

Published

August 6, 2025

CNG Education Working Group meeting 2025-08-06

Please add new agenda items under the New agenda items heading!

Attendees

Your name / GitHub ID / affiliation / icebreaker

Matt Fisher / @mfisher87 / DSE / ?
Andrew Smith / asmithml/ me
Jarrett Keifer / @jkeifer / Element 84 / ?
Michelle Roby / PowerChell / Radiant Earth / ?

Action items

Add to user persona descriptions in issue #11
Matt & Jarrett: think about Quarto as a platform, linkage
Matt: Update our meeting notes template to reflect structure of this one.
Andrew: Fill out more user personas in Google Doc - project manager and land manager.
Michelle: Go through #2 and write up a summary of each one, categorize/group them as relates to persona scenarios.

Notes

New agenda items

Goal for the day: Review Stephanies user personas
Curriculum design
- Follow carpenties’ lead (see: https://swcarpentry.github.io/git-novice/):
  - Chunk the lessons up
  - Index the chunks well
  - Set expectations (prerequisites, outcomes) at the beginning of each chunk
  - Enables a “build your own adventure approach”
  - Personas don’t describe everyone in a category, e.g. geographers. Personas act as a lens for us to design the curriculum for various perspectives. Not necessarily a user interface element, e.g. Click the “I am a geographer” button and then be taken to relevant lessons.
    - An extra in the future could be persona-based entry-points, but avoiding that up-front will help us reduce the scope and make it easier to start.
- If we’re defining preqreqs for the lessons, what about building a DAG of lessons that enables users to explore the dependency graph of the materials? (visualize as a graph?)
- Introductory materials should be project-focused with a cool outcome!
  - But important to have deeply-referenced content backing up the instructional materials
  - Could start with hand-holdy, high-level, cool, on-rails example to help people visualize themselves doing cool stuff, then dig in to the more “boring” examples.
What do we do next? How do we move from planning to doing?

What’s our current strategy?

Personas are a lens for design
Build curriculum in a way that users can “create their own adventure”
- Defining prereqs and outcomes, maybe link lessons together to generate a map

Next step

Pick one initial scope, e.g. raster data * Evaluate existing resources (e.g.) against persona lenses as a starting point. * Once we have content ideas, what technology are we using to display / publish? Quarto?