DMSC School Lecture Materials

Lecture material repository for teachers at DMSC School.

Course Directories

There are 6 courses in the summer school. Each course has its own directory for collecting materials in this repository.

• 1-python
• 3-mcstas
• 4-reduction
• 5-analysis
• 6-scicat

Jupyter notebooks

Many of materials are written in notebooks and are published online by jupyter-book. Here are some tips and tools for writing jupyter notebooks for courses.

Clearing output

Command to clear outputs of all jupyter notebooks in the current directory.

tree -ifF -P *.ipynb | grep .ipynb | xargs -n1 jupyter nbconvert --ClearOutputPreprocessor.enabled=True --inplace

Building the book

Make sure you have installed all the dependencies in the requirements.txt file. Then use (from the root folder):

jupyter-book build -W --keep-going .

Tags

Teachers can add tags into the each cells for building textbooks and exporting workbooks.

These are available tags handled by jupyter-book build or update_workbook.py script.

Jupyter-book tags

There are a few tags that are often used. See this page for more options.

• hide-cell Both input and output will be hidden in the published pages.
• raise-exceptions If an exception is expected to be raised from the cell. If you are using this tag with remove-output tag, consider moving this code snippet to markdown as a code block.
• remove-output outputs of the cell will not be included in the published pages.
• remove-cell Not included in the build. Also used by update_workbook.py script.

Workbook tags

• solution: Solution of the exercise. Source code will be replaced with a instruction message.
• remove-cell: Not included in the workbooks. Also used by jupyter-book.
• dmsc-school-hint: Editable cell with hints for students. The tagged cell in the workbook will not be read-only, unless it is already read-only in the textbook.
• dmsc-school-keep: Will not be edited or removed. It overwrites all other tags.

How to export workbook from lecture materials

There is a python script update_workbook.py to create a workbook(jupyter notebook) from the jupyter notebook lecture materials in course directories based on the tags of each cells.

All cells in the workbook will be read-only by default except for solution cells. Cells can be tagged with dmsc-shool-hint to keep their editability.

If there is python files, or image files('.png', '.jpg', '*.svg') in the lecture material directories, it also copies them into the workbook submodule.

It doesn't handle other type of files on purpose.

1. Set up or update submodule:workbooks

You need to set up the git submodule workbooks before you run the script.

git -C workbooks branch # Make sure if you're in the right branch of submodule

git submodule update  # Use --init tag if it is the first time pulling submodule

2. Update workbooks

And then you can update materials.

python update_workbook.py --all  # Update all workbooks

# or
python update_workbook.py  # Update based on git status

3. Commit & push workbooks

Once you update the workbook, you have to commit and push the changes of the submodule manually.

The script will report which files are updated based on git status.

The script doesn't commit any changes automatically on purpose to avoid unexpected changes of workbooks.