Teaching and learning with Jupyter Notebooks#

Introduction#

In the spirit of open education resources, rather than writing our own guidelines, we will point to this 2019 DOC (which has a creative commons license, CC-BY 4.0): Teaching and Learning with Jupyter. It also has a repository. It is rather long and could likely be reduced to “point form”.

Guidelines for using the UBC JupyterHub for teaching were introduced in 2023. These are likely to evolve as the facility improves.

The rest of this page summarizes ways that Jupyter notebooks have been introduced to EOAS faculty and students for teaching and learning purposes. Detailed guidelines, and examples of uses from various courses, will be provided in separate pages.

Getting started: Guidelines for setting up you local computer to run Jupyter Notebooks are in our Python / Jupyter Notebooks startup page.

Developing programming skills with J-Notebooks#

These links will provide some insights regarding ways Jupyter Notebooks are being used in courses supported by the OCESE project.

  • DSCI 100, Data Science 100: Introduction to Data Science.

  • EOSC 211, Computer Methods in Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences.

  • EOSC 354, Analysis of Time Series and Inverse Theory for Earth Scientists.

  • EOSC 442, Climate Measurement and Analysis.

  • ATSC 301, Atmospheric Radiation and Remote Sensing.

There are other courses that did not receive explicit support during the OCESE project, especially graduate level courses.

Demonstrating concepts without programming#

Applications of Jupyter notebooks in which students use the notebooks but do not do any actual programming.

  • EOSC 350, Environmental, Geotechnical, and Exploration Geophysics I.

Developing data science skills#

Jupyter Notebooks are ideal for teaching data visualization techniques such as legibility, visual hierarchy, and appropriate use of color. See precedent in Hepworth et al., 2018.

Deploying Jupyter notebooks for students#

The servers and hubs page offers a few insights gained during the OCESE project.

Third party references#

There is an excellent open-source handbook for teaching and learning with Jupyter, dated December 2019. This guidebook’s home page includes licensing information (CC-BY 4.0) and a link to the book’s GitHub repository.

There are many specific notebooks or notebook collections for teaching and learning specific subjects. Examples include: