Certificates and credits

It is possible to obtain a certificate from the course with a little extra work. The certificate is equivalent to 1 ECTS and your study supervisor will be able to register it as a credit in your university study credit system. Please make sure that your supervisor/study program accepts it.

Learners with a valid Aalto student number will automatically get the credit registered in Aalto systems: if you are from Aalto University you will need to enroll via SISU to SCI-L1010.

If your university follow other criteria that you have agreed with your local team, please get in touch with your people.

How to obtain a certificate/credit

To obtain a certificate, you must be affiliated with a university, or similar research organisation. We expect you to follow all days of the course and provide us with the following three text documents sent from your university email:

1. A document that shows that you did the GitHub exercises (week 1) during the course. Note: if you are planning to delete the exercise repository from your GitHub projects, instead of sending links to your work you can send PDF screenshots e.g. by doing "print to PDF" with your browser.
   • Write one or more paragraphs about Day 1 - Exercise 2: provide the link to the forked repository on your GitHub account and show that you did new commits. If you did not use GitHub and if you used the command line, then provide the output of the command git log --all for the forked repository. Explain what you did.
   • Write one or more paragraphs about Day 2 - Exercise 3: provide the link to the new repository you have created on your GitHub account. If you did not use GitHub and if you used the command line, then provide the output of the command git log --all for the newly created repository. Explain what you did.
   • Write one or more paragraphs about Day 3 - Exercise 1: provide the link to the pull request. Explain what you did.
2. Written answers to the following four questions submitted as a document (pdf or word or txt). Evaluation criteria: we expect critical answers related to the content of first 3 days with both pros and cons (when relevant):
   • When should you work with branches?
   • What is the difference between a git clone and a git fork?
   • What is the difference between a fork and a branch?
   • What advantages and disadvantages to code review can you imagine/list?
3. A personal reflection for each of the days written as a document (pdf or word or txt, one paragraph per day). To get started, you can try answering the questions: "Why is this important? How can it improve my research work?" However any other personal reflection is welcome. Evaluation criteria: we expect reflections that are related to the content of each of the nine days.

Note: Alternative options for homework if you find more useful to do other exercises, you can also submit one alternative exercise instead of one of the 3 listed above. So for example you can submit your experiments with Sphinx and github pages (option 2 below), and not do the document with the personal reflections. Here the alternative options:

1. Develop a snakemake pipeline for your specific data analysis case
2. Build a Sphinx mini-website using GitHub pages. Try changing the default template.
3. Show a repository where you have developed some tests for your code, possibly using workflow automations for testing.

The documents should be sent to scip _@_ aalto.fi (remove spaces and underscores from the email address written here) by 16/November/2025. Certificates will be issued by the end of November. Clearly name each document with your name (and student number for Aalto University students). You must use your university email to submit your course materials. We do not provide certificates to people who are not affiliated with a higher education / research institution, but you are of course welcome to follow the course and learn with us. If you are from Aalto University, submit the files to myCourses.

As this is a very simple homework, the use of generative AI (like ChatGPT) is not allowed. We also have access to ChatGPT and we know how to write prompts that can generate the answers to these homework, so it is very easy for us to check when AI was used. Submissions suspected of being generated by AI will be rejected.