scipy-2015-slides
scipy-2015-slides
1 1
scipy-2015-slides
Slides for my talk on JupyterHub and education at SciPy 2015On Github jhamrick / scipy-2015-slides
Teaching with Jupyter Notebooks and JupyterHub¶
Jess Hamrick
@jhamrick
Min RK
@minrk
Kyle Kelley
@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¶
How it works¶
How it works¶
How it works¶
How it works¶
How it works¶
How it works¶
How it works¶
How it works¶
How it works¶
How it works¶
How it works¶
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