Summary and Setup

Designing and building your own geospatial teaching module as a Carpentries-style lesson (Markdown basics, creating a lesson repository from the Workbench template, working with GitHub Desktop, and adding episodes), with additional readings on data curation, FAIR data, metadata and data sharing.

This module was taught as part of the Purdue-NSF GIS Cybertraining for the Social Sciences Workshop, a two-day workshop held at Purdue University in 2026 (Day 2, Putting it all Together, for all participants). See the Workshop 2026 page for the full program.

It is part of Enabling the Geospatial Turn in the Social Sciences, a set of training modules developed at Purdue University with support from the National Science Foundation.

Day 2 Schedule

Time Session Details
8:30 AM Breakfast WALC 2051
9:00 AM Welcome and Day 2 introduction WALC 2127
9:15 AM Teaching with Geospatial Brainstorming Session Small group exercise: outline a new geospatial element, exercise, or project for your own class or lab. Prompts provided to guide you.
10:00 AM Group sharing and feedback Present your ideas, get input from the group
10:30 AM Coffee break WALC 2124
10:45 AM Customizing Carpentries Modules for Classroom Use Markdown basics, tutorial construction, and hands-on module building. On your own: read more about data sharing platforms, FAIR data standards, and metadata practices.
12:00 PM Closing discussion Preview of 2027 module development workshop
12:30 PM Box lunch provided WALC 2124

What You Need for Day 2

Day 2 focuses on designing and building your own teaching modules. The requirements are lighter than Day 1: no GIS software or data accounts needed.

Software

  • GitHub Desktop: for cloning and pushing lesson repositories without using the command line → Download here
  • A text editor: for editing Markdown files locally. Any of the following will work:
    • VS Code (recommended, it has built-in Markdown preview)
    • Notepad++ (Windows)
    • TextEdit (Mac) or any plain text editor

Accounts

  • GitHub: you will create a lesson repository and host it on GitHub Pages → Sign up here if you do not have an account

Preparation

  • Morning session (9:15 AM): Think about a course, lab, or project you teach (or plan to teach) that could benefit from a geospatial component. You will work in small groups to outline a module, so having a specific class in mind will help.
  • Afternoon session (10:45 AM): If you are new to Markdown, a quick glance at markdownguide.org/basic-syntax beforehand is helpful but not required: we will cover the basics during the session.

Checklist