Dhavide Aruliah 10 Years of Teaching with Jupyter: Reflections from Industry & Academia | JupyterC

Teaching & learning with Jupyter notebooks ought to be straightforward, right? Unfortunately, no, not exactly; my experience—both in developing content & in live instruction—suggests otherwise. I'm drawing on a decade of teaching efforts for undergraduate/postgraduate university courses, for Software Carpentry bootcamps, and for corporate or government training engagements. I've personally wrestled with numerous nuts-and-bolts technological obstacles to promoting computational thinking in learners with Jupyter: deploying robust, "99% invisible" computational environments so learners can start quickly (i.e., without painful software installation or configuration); accessing data smoothly (especially when balancing privacy/security concerns with teaching goals); and managing notebook versions for collaborating instructors. I'll describe a few technological (and non-technlogical) ways to address the above. These include Nebari (an open-source JupyterHub distribution platform), RISE (a Reveal.js Jupyter slideshow extension), Anaconda Project (for supporting reproducible, shareable data science projects), and EtherPad (for live interactive group collaboration in a text-editor interface). By design, Jupyter notebooks enable immediate learner feedback. That is, learners can modify code interactively to improve their internal mental models of what's going on and do so autonomously—this is ultimately what I want when teaching. While tooling is critical for designing & maintaining content, I'll steadfastly reinforce my central priority: getting tools out of the way. Ideally, learners should focus on building the knowledge and skills they need to solve their own problems. By design, Jupyter notebooks enable immediate learner feedback. That is, learners can modify code interactively to improve their internal mental models of what's going on and do so autonomously—this is ultimately what I want when teaching. Finally, I'll discuss pedagogical considerations unrelated to Jupy