Using Jupyter Tools to Design an Interactive Textbook to Guide Undergraduate Research in Materials Informatics

Abstract

With the growing desire to incorporate data science and informatics into STEM curricula, there is an opportunity to integrate research-based software and tools (e.g., Python) within existing pedagogical methods to craft new, accessible learning experiences. We show how the open-source Jupyter Book software can achieve this goal by creating a digital, interactive textbook compiled from Jupyter notebooks, which are already commonplace in research. Using Jupyter Book, we design an open-source, introductory materials informatics research curriculum where the Python programming exercises are supplemented with prose, graphics, slides, and discussion questions, all of which are embedded into a uniform web interface for streamlined access. Interactive programming capabilities, enabled through the JupyterHub cloud infrastructure, provide opportunities in these digital spaces for students to interrogate the code, test their own hypotheses, and deepen their comprehension. These authentic learning experiences demonstrate the broad utility of the Jupyter ecosystem in sustaining the growth of materials informatics education.

Teaching Design, Arts, and Fashion Students about Plastics and Recycling: The Use of Online and Offline Escape Room Scenarios

“…Second, in the Supporting Information, we have included a ready-to-use .ipynb python file which can run in Google Colab 23 or in Jupyter. 24 As shown in Figure S2 after running, the code requires the introduction of the time and date to finish the activity (time limit) and the 4-digit-code. It will then require the code to defuse the bomb.…”

Comment on gc-2024-6

“…The runtime environment needed to compile the modules can be easily installed using the standard Python package managers pip, conda or mamba, and contains a set of command-line utilities for the compilation of textbooks from Markdown text (.md), Jupyter Notebook (.ipynb) or reStructuredText (.rst) files -all of which open formats. The implementation of the Markedly Structured Text (MyST) syntax, an extension of Markdown, provides simplicity while still being powerful enough to create rich content pages with text, figures, automatically-generated citations, executable and in-line code-cells, slide-shows, and embedded files (e.g., three-dimensional [3-D], interactive environments) and videos (Chen and Asta, 2022;Executable Books Community, 2020). Although not explored in the Geo-SfM and Geo-UAV modules, pages can also integrate with cloud-providers such as JupyterHub (Project Jupyter, 2023) and Google Colab (Bisong, 2019) to facilitate executable and programmable content without having to install libraries locally.…”

“…Open-source curricula have been shown to facilitate participation, discussion and co-ownership amongst students and the broader community, inviting all to participate in the collaborative development of educational resources (Chen and Asta, 2022;Kim et al, 2021). Analysis of feedback provided by the students indicated as much and highlighted several advantages of using the Jupyter Book/GitHub framework, in particular.…”

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“…101,103,104 It is an ongoing discussion 101,105 about using the EVS score or R 2 ; however, the maintainer of Scikit-Learn recommends using R 2 over EVS, because R 2 takes a systematic offset in the prediction into account. 106 Jupyter Notebook Support For interactive work, as recently became popular in chemistry 49,107 , SpectraFit also provides a Jupyter Notebook interface. The Jupyter Notebook interface is based on the Jupyter Notebook package 21 and supports the user with a graphical user interface (GUI) via Plotly.…”