Teaching with online programmable notebooks

These programmable notebooks, called Jupyter Notebooks, are interactive documents that combine code, equations, visualizations and text. Very flexible, they allow teachers to develop virtual demonstrations, interactive exercises or multimedia handouts very easily. From the polytechnic courses of the propaedeutics to the “Data Science” courses at master’s or doctoral level, the applications are numerous. In General Physics, Cécile Hébert develops notebooks that, for instance, allow students to dynamically visualize abstract notions such as the different vectors representing forces, speeds or accelerations. The objective is as much to facilitate the understanding of the concepts behind physical phenomena as to deconstruct the misconceptions that hinder students’ learning. In his Signal Processing course, Paolo Prandoni uses Python programs to illustrate the effect of different types of processing on audio signals, such as turning the sound emitted when dialling a telephone number into a number. In addition to including elements of the course theory in LaTeX, the notebooks allow students to execute the code and to read the resulting audio files. These interactive handouts therefore allow students to see how the programs work in practice. To test it, follow this link which will ask you to authenticate yourself and will automatically download Paolo Prandoni’s notebooks: http://go.epfl.ch/COM303-noto

One-click access to develop computational thinking.
With the NOTO platform, students can now use the programmable notebooks without having to install anything on their computer: a simple web browser allows them to access, modify and run notebooks online. The Centre for Digital Education thus aims to promote the use of notebooks in education and also offers technical and pedagogical support to teachers who wish to use it. One of the objectives is to support the introduction of computational thinking into student training. Originally developed for research and scientific publication, Jupyter offers digital methods and data science tools in several programming languages.

The NOTO platform is accessible to all members of the EPFL community upon simple authentication with Gaspar login: http://noto.epfl.ch

More information:
NOTO is a project of the Vice Presidency for Education, carried out by the LEARN, CAPE and CEDE centres with a financial contribution from SwissUniversities.
The Vice-President for Education also supports the creation of notebooks for education through the DRIL fund (Digital Resources for Instruction and Learning, https://moocs.epfl.ch/dril-fund-digital-resources-for-instruction-and-learning/). The next call for projects is scheduled for November 4, 2019 and will be followed by two calls per year.

Would you like to develop notebooks for your courses or for your MOOCs?
Do you have any questions about NOTO?

Do not hesitate to contact us: noto-support@groupes.epfl.ch

Patrick Jermann (DRIL Fund)
Cécile Hardebolle (Pedagogical Support)
Pierre-Olivier Vallès (Technical Support)

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