The Carpentries Workbench
An accessible lesson infrastructure built in R
We are testing use of The Workbench on a small number of official lessons.
Learn more about how to participate in the Beta Phase.
The Workbench is a complete redesign of The Carpentries lesson websites, with new features prioritising accessibility and navigation. All Carpentries lessons will begin using The Carpentries Workbench in May 2023.
Resources
Installation
To install the workbench, make sure you have a working version of R and pandoc/RStudio installed (see the workbench setup instructions for details).
From there, you can install the workbench packages and their dependencies from our Carpentries R Universe:
install.packages(c("sandpaper", "varnish", "pegboard", "tinkr"),
repos = c("https://carpentries.r-universe.dev/", getOption("repos")))
Updating
To update workbench packages, you can use the same command as you did to install your packages:
install.packages(c("sandpaper", "varnish", "pegboard", "tinkr"),
repos = c("https://carpentries.r-universe.dev/", getOption("repos")))
Guides
- Glossary A glossary of terms for The Workbench.
- Official Workbench Documentation: written using The Workbench, this guide provides everything you need to get started using The Workbench.
- Collaborative Lesson Development Training: Material for a three day workshop teaching good practices in lesson design and open source collaboration skills
Tools
- {sandpaper}: User interface and engine for the workbench
- {pegboard}: Validation and parsing of lesson components
- {varnish}: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript templates
- (carpentries/actions): GitHub Actions for Workbench Workflows
- (carpentries/lesson-transition): Tool for automated transition from styles-based lessons to Workbench.
Templates
Inspired Examples
These are examples of lessons developed with The Workbench since the initial announcement:
- Toby Hodges, Mateusz Kuzak, Aleksandra Nenadic, Sarah Stevens—Collaborative Lesson Development Training
- Saranjeet Kuar, Achintya Rao, Heather Turner, Aman Goel—R’s Bug Tracking
- Saba Ferdous, David Pérez-Suárez—Learn To Discover—Basic Python (note—this uses a custom fork of sandpaper, and varnish to run python)
- Philipp Matthias Schäfer—GitLab Novice
- Michael Culshaw-Maurer—Rewrite of the R Ecology Lesson