Main goals
ECCO is a combinatorics summer school organized every other year in Colombia. It welcomes students from all over the world of all levels: from undergraduates to postdocs. It is known to be a very interesting event and to have a great impact for combinatorics in Colombia and South America in general. The Sage community in combinatorics being very active, it was a great occasion to introduce Sage to a new generation of researchers.
OpenDreamKit implication
Viviane Pons was sent by OpenDreamKit to give two Sage interventions during the school.
Event summary
Each intervention was 2 hours long with around 50 participants each time. Most participants were using the university computers. 50 USB sticks were bought previous to the conference and set up with bootable Linux and sage, allowing for a very quick setup during the two sessions without relying on on-line options. The students worked on some introduction tutorials and also specifically made tutorials in relation with the on-going classes.
Demographic
66 participants came from South and Central America, 34 from North America and 30 from Europe.
Results and impact
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The organizers were very happy that OpenDreamKit would propose to send someone at the school. They did not have anyone who could carry such an intervention which requires both Sage and technical skills.
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It was quite a challenge to get Sage to work in approximatively 10 minutes for 50 computers all together. The solution of the bootable USB sticks has been developed by Thierry Monteil but is not well known nor well documented. This was an occasion to test this solution in this particular setup and improve our experience for future events.
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The bootable USB keys were very successful and many students brought their own sticks to get a copy of the software. During the sessions, we could also help students install Sage on their own computers.
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Many of the students, especially the younger ones from South America, had never used Sage before. We proposed many different tutorials so that everyone could have something to work on and we created exercises related to the class content of the two weeks. We received enthusiastic feedbacks for the sessions.
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Some of the introduction tutorials of the Sage documentation were translated into Spanish for the sessions and will eventually be added to Sage.
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The conference in general was a very rewarding event. It has been growing and successful for the past ten years with a strong focus on inclusivity and impact. It was a great occasion to be part of the event and learn from their experience. A blog post from Viviane Pons was published by the AMS Blog, On Teaching and learning mathematics\cite{16PonsECCO}.
\begin{figure}[ht] \caption*{Participants of ECCO at the Sage sessions} \includegraphics[scale=0.5]{pictures/ECCO-1.jpg}
\includegraphics[scale=0.5]{pictures/ECCO-2.jpg} \end{figure}