[IPython-dev] IPython-dev Digest, Vol 122, Issue 46

[Alessandro Gagliardi]

I’m personally of the opinion that, all else being equal, it’s best to have the students run IPython Notebook locally. It does take time, which may be perceived as “wasted” by students, but getting your tools working on your computer is a prerequisite to doing anything, and better that students suffer through that with the help of teachers and colleagues to help them debug than on their own.

That said, if you don’t want to deal with such issues, Wakari might work for you. The main thing I’m interested in is getting the notebooks to talk to each other (or at least, to the instructor’s and TAs’) which might mean hosting them all on one server.

Here’s a thought: I wonder if it would be possible to use IPython.parallel to get a direct view into the student’s namespaces. We could tell the students to use certain variable names and then use the DirectView.gather to get the results and see how they compare. The objects could then be anything pickle-able.

Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2014 13:20:36 +1100
From: Clare Sloggett <claresloggett at gmail.com<mailto:claresloggett at gmail.com>>
Subject: Re: [IPython-dev] IPython for Education
To: IPython developers list <ipython-dev at scipy.org<mailto:ipython-dev at scipy.org>>
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Hi Doug,

I'm still fairly new to IPython Notebook - is this idea (multiple different
logins) just talking about something you'd like to see, or are you talking
about technology which exists?

I've been thinking about using IPython Notebook for teaching by having each
student create a separate notebook, but I'm given pause by
a) it's very easy for students to mess with one anothers' notebooks, either
accidentally or on purpose
b) all students would be based in the same working directory so they could
easily corrupt one anothers' data files - this would be even more likely to
happen by accident than (a).

The best I've come up with so far is to create a set of notebook profiles
with different passwords, and launch a server instance per student on
different ports. If there is currently a way of handling multiple users in
IPython Notebook I'd be interested!

Of course the other option is to have students run their notebook on
localhost on their own computer, but sometimes we're in a lab situation
where I don't have a lot of control over the machines and this is difficult
to set up. Servers are easier in that situation.

Cheers,
Clare

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