WAVES: Workshop for Avida-ED Software Development

WAVES was a ten-week, funded, fully-remote summer workshop pairing early-career participants with mentored hands-on projects writing, testing, and documenting interactive scientific and educational web software in support of the Avida-ED digital evolution platform. The 2020 and 2021 iterations of the workshop together engaged 27 participants.

The goal of the workshop was four-fold:

• to help participants advance their careers by skillbuilding through hands-on C++ and/or JavaScript software development in an academic setting,
• to catalyze effective science communication and science pedagogy by helping participants develop the know-how to showcase their research through interactive web applications,
• to jumpstart software development on web framework and core digital evolution tools in support of the next version of the Avida-ED scientific and educational software, and
• to produce software that broadly enriches the digital evolution, scientific, education, and open-source communities.