Teaching with Jupyter Notebooks and JupyterHub¶
Jess Hamrick
@jhamrick
@jhamrick
Min RK
@minrk
@minrk
Kyle Kelley
@rgbkrk
@rgbkrk
Go here and add your GitHub username!¶
http://tinyurl.com/scipy2015-jupyterhub-demo
Or find it from my Twitter feed (@jhamrick)¶
(or google for rackspace jupyterhub)
I'm going to tell you a story¶
- About teaching with notebooks
- And nbgrader
- Also JupyterHub
Computational models of cognition¶
a.k.a. "compmodels"
Assignment structure¶
- Background material
- Instructions and examples
- Coding exercises
- Plotting exercises
- Written interpretation of results
Original assignments¶
- Zip archive of assignment files
- PDF with instructions, some Matlab files, and some text files
Issue¶
- Inconsistent instructions
- Mismatch between solutions and student version
- Encoding issues
- Renamed and missing files
- Autograding in Matlab is horrible
How to improve the assignments?¶
Python is awesome!¶
Jupyter notebooks are awesome!¶
I should use them for our assignments!¶
... how do I grade them?¶
Solution: nbgrader¶
- Stands for "notebook grader"
- Tools for creating, releasing, collecting, and grading notebook assignments
Example Assignment
Challenges with notebooks¶
- Students will need help installing Jupyter
- Difficult to ensure everyone has the same library versions
- Libraries may need to be updated after the course has started
- Some students will submit assignments incorrectly
- 200+ students is a lot!
Solution: JupyterHub¶
- Service that authenticates users and launches separate Jupyter notebook servers for each user
- Cross-platform
- Exactly the same environment for all students
- Can update software versions in the middle of the semester
- Easy to distribute/collect assignments
Challenges¶
- Scaling to ~220 users
- Isolating user environments
- Persistent home directories
Solution: Docker + NFS¶
JupyterHub demo¶
How it works¶
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So, how'd it go?¶
- Having identical environments is super convenient
- Students really liked working with the notebook
- Developing good, testable assignments is hard
- Don't let the server crash during the final