Leaders in effective and inclusive STEM: Twenty years of the Institute for Scientist & Engineer Educators

Software development is becoming increasingly ubiquitous in STEM disciplines resulting in the need for education in associated computational skills. To address this need, we designed a "Sustainable Software Development with Collaborative Version Control" workshop in the 2019 Institute for Scientist & Engineer Educators (ISEE) Professional Development Program (PDP). We describe here the development process and following delivery of the workshop. In particular, we explored how to apply an inquiry approach to learning computational skills. By design, PDP activities intertwine content and “cognitive STEM practices,” and teasing apart content and practice is important for STEM education. We encountered challenges with this task because our content — exploring software sustainability with collaborative version control — is much like a practice in itself. We designed our workshop to introduce the critical skill of sustainable software development using collaborative version control systems with an inquiry approach rather than the more typically used, strictly technical approach. We emphasize the authentic, broadly applicable nature of the workshop in which learners jointly design, test, and discuss their own increasingly complex development workflows. The development process for our workshop may be useful for educators who want to introduce software practices to learners from many disparate STEM disciplines that leverage computational methods and require software development to approach research questions.