Over the Summer I was successful in my application for one of the Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol’s small grants (£2500), to start a project entitled “Creating Welsh Medium Multi-Media Programming Resources”. There were two main aims to the project, to teach and communicate computational skills in Welsh to undergraduate and to postgraduate students.

For postgraduate students and project students, we developed a website that curates and adapts resources on conducting reproducible computational research. For undergraduate students, we developed a comprehensive video series that teaches the Python programming language. With the grant money we were able to take on a student, Stephanie Jones from the School of Mathematics in Cardiff, to develop and record the videos.

The Aim

At the moment there is a shortage of open computing resources in Welsh. We are hoping to begin to fill this shortage in order to:

  • Support the Welsh medium teaching of Python that is already happening in Welsh universities (e.g. in Cardiff and Aberystwyth universities, and others) - and so support Welsh medium higher education, and deepen theses students’ experiences.
  • Develop coders and software engineers of the future who are comfortable working bilingually.
  • Communicate computational skills in a more personal, accessible and appropriate way for the Welsh speaking community.

The Produce

  • A comprehensive set of 28 videos that cover downloading, installing and running Python; basic syntax; and algorithmic thinking by solving example problems. The aim is for them to complement and accompany formal teaching in universities. There are available here and here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSkPgScy-DkFdCzwJW9X_B9IfTouojem7
  • A Welsh language website that is part adaptation of a research software development workshop, and part curation of resources on computational research skills. It includes topics such open research, automation skills, best practices in coding, and version control. This adaptation to a website increases it’s availability to the community of Welsh speaking researchers, and can also act as a reference resource. It is available here: https://sgiliauymchwilcyfrifiadurol.github.io/

Thank you very much to the Coleg Cymraeg for the opportunity to complete this project, to Steph for her hard work, and to the School of Mathematics for their support; and we hope that these resources will be of benefit to students.