Teaching numerical methods with IPython notebooks

Instructors: David Ketcheson and Aron Ahmadia
Monday, July 7 1-5 p.m.

Outline

Motivation
- Inquiry-based learning
- Numerical methods as a craft
Getting started
- Sage Math Cloud
- The IPython Notebook (basics)
  - If most attendees are familiar, skip this
  - mention that students should type all the code
- Using SMC collaboratively
- Distributing notebooks
  - nbviewer
  - SMC
- Methods for collecting notebooks
  - Add instructor as collaborator
  - E-mail
  - nbviewer
  - in-class presentation
Using the notebook
- Visuals
  - Images
    - best to use Markdown
  - Plotting
    - matplotlib
    - plotly for interactive plots
    - others? (Bokeh)
  - Animations and widgets
    - JSAnimation
    - IPython widgets
- nbconvert
  - presentations
  - handouts
- Styling modifications
  - outline running cells
  - group code and output
Examples of notebooks for teaching
- A single short concept (Aliasing)
- A homework exercise or in-class activity (finite differences)
- A lesson or laboratory session (multigrid)
- A short course: HyperPython
Time for participants to design their own notebooks (and share them?)