Coding school

The Aether Core Team runs a coding school that offers multiple levels of training on software and model development. The school is logically scaled in experience level as a function of time, so that users who know nothing about using models can attend the early days of the school, while more experienced users who would like to start contributing can attend later days of the school.

Student hackathons are also conducted to add new features to the model. Overlapping of experience levels allows users/contributors to interact and optimize training and development.

Sustainability of the coding school is promoted by encouraging students from previous years to act as assistants and then as teachers.

Wider community involvement is encouraged through the creation and dissemination of online training courses and videos.

These materials are developed by undergraduate and graduate students. They introduce relatively simple concepts to students and other new users, allowing them to rapidly climb the steep learning curve involved in using a model like Aether.

These tutorials are directed towards undergraduates and beginning graduate students with topics including logging into NASA and NSF computing resources for the first time, managing the queue system, checking out and configuring the model, submitting jobs, post processing, and making plots. These are simple tutorials, but the topics contained within are either not available or not easily discoverable.