D2.9: Demonstrator: interactive books on Linear Algebra and Nonlinear Processes in Biology

[minrk]

• WP2: Community Building, Training, Dissemination, Exploitation, and Outreach
• Lead Institution: University of Silesia
• Due: 2018-08-31 (month 36)
• Nature: Demonstrator
• Task: T2.9 (#32)
• Proposal: p. 38
• Final report (sources)

Interactive web pages have always been an attractive tool in education. It has started in the age of Adobe-Flash technology, when a lot of educational material was created. The advent of JavaScript has led to significant improvements in that field: in the first place it created a possibility to author the content using Open Source tools and secondly it increased the portability of the created documents to practically all devices equipped with a modern web browser.

The problem which was persistent in those solutions was the big gap between the authoring process of interactive documents and their usage. Usually the code behind an interactive example was not very educational and was not supposed to be edited by the student.

Then emerged the concept of interactive widgets in the notebook, appearing first in Mathematica, then being popularized by the Sage notebook, and recently getting huge traction with the Jupyter notebook thanks to its wide audience. Interactive widgets, and in particular the very simple to use @interact decorator, delivered a versatile solution to this problem: they made it possible to turn with little efforts a mere scientific calculation into a visually appealing interactive application, all within the original
environment where the mathematical explorations took place.

The need of including computer technology for teaching at University of Silesia was sparked by interdisciplinary courses. In those fields it is common to master numerical tools for modeling and at the same time to gain an intuition. Integration of modern computer technology allows students to more efficiently analyse a system without tedious symbolic calculations. This has led to systematic integration of Sage system with science education at the Institute of Physics since 2011. In this deliverable we have created texbooks which consists of c.a. 500 pages with over hundred interactive code cells and code examples and tens of figures. The audience for those books are students of physics, biophysics, econophysics and medical physics.

[bpilorget]

#48 was merged into #49 with 3rd amendment of the contract

[nthiery]

Hi @marcinofulus,
How is it going with this deliverable, and in particular the report? A draft to review soon would be very helpful. Presumably the report can be fairly short. Let me know if you need any help.
Thanks in advance,

[marcinofulus]

Hi @nthiery,

The report is ready for proofreading.
I have put the link to books repo inside the report, and the link to hosted (live) version will be in the repo.
I will hopefully make possible to change hosting and keep links working in the future.

mk

[nthiery]

Hi @marcinofulus,

I just finished reviewing your report. You can find the updated file in the D2.9 branch (to be merged in master as soon as the latter is fixed):

https://github.com/OpenDreamKit/OpenDreamKit/tree/D2.9

[nthiery]

Altogether looking good; I added some suggestions.
Thanks in advance!

[nthiery]

I merged back the branch in master; please continue edits there. I am about to add two additional suggestions.

[nthiery]

Done!

With little if not change (just converting to markdown), this report, once finished, will make a nice blog post on ODK's site!

We should also have a use case on authoring interactive books on our web page: https://opendreamkit.org/project/use-cases/ volunteers to kick off this are welcome :-)

[nthiery]

Hi @marcinofulus,
Beautiful; thanks for finalizing the report; it now is strikingly impressive! Please transmit my congratulations to all authors. I will submit it soon.
Please edit the first entry of this issue to look like, e.g., that of #64, including in particular a copy of the introduction.
I am now looking forward the completely finalized books, the blog post, and further discussions about Sphinx for authoring interactive material!

[IzabelaFaguet]

Accepted by the EU on December 5th.

[nthiery]

Hey @marcinofulus!

I am now looking forward the completely finalized books, the blog post, and further discussions about Sphinx for authoring interactive material!

Any progress in this direction? Could you add direct links to the interactive textbooks in the above issue description? Also, we should add a use-case "authoring interactive textbooks" to our use case page. Could you prepare one? See the existing ones for the format.
Thanks in advance!