Take one, make one

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There’s a teaching method originating in medicine known as “see one, do one, teach one”. I like it because it underscores hands-on practice and knowledge sharing as essential steps in developing a craft — and it works. Today, I want to urge you to take a challenge, then make one for others.

First, what’s the challenge?

A couple of years ago, inspired by the annual Advent of Code challenges, we introduced the kata, a set of coding challenges especially for geoscientists. For a long time we sent them to students in our Geocomputing class, to encourage them to keep coding. Now we just tell everyone about them.

At the time we announced the kata, there were five puzzles. Today, there are 11: four beginner-friendly challenges, four intermediate ones, and three quite hard ones. Topics range from data munging to map indexing, and from digital elevation models to fractures.

💡 If you want to try one, this Colab is the easiest way to get started: https://ageo.co/kata-live

Now make one!

Once you’ve got an idea of how these things work, you might want to try your hand at making one. Once you have an idea for a short task, you need a way to generate a random dataset. For example, for the sample-names challenge, I have a function that generates a random set of sample names, composed of several parts (a number, a basin, a formation, a data, etc).

When you have a dataset, you can ask some questions about it. Start with an one, and build from there. The last question (there can be 3 or 4), should be a somewhat realistic challenge for this kind of data. Each question needs a hint, and each question must have only one possible answer (this is the tricky bit!).

If you fancy trying your hand at it, check out our new kata-dev repository on GitHub. There is a demo challenge there, which is also live on the kata server, so you can see how it all works. Good luck!

Whether or not you try making a challenge for your peers, so let us know how you get on in the #kata-challenges channel on the Software Underground. We’re always ready to answer questions about them.