scicode-widgets: Bringing Computational Experiments to the Classroom with Jupyter Widgets

TL;DR

scicode-widgets is a Python package that enhances Jupyter notebooks for teaching scientific concepts by creating interactive, focused educational experiments that improve student engagement and understanding.

Contribution

The paper introduces scicode-widgets, a novel Python library that simplifies the development of interactive, pedagogically meaningful Jupyter-based exercises for science and engineering education.

Findings

Enables creation of interactive educational experiments in Jupyter notebooks.

Allows seamless integration of student code testing and visualization.

Improves student engagement and understanding in scientific learning.

Abstract

"Computational experiments" use code and interactive visualizations to convey mathematical and physical concepts in an intuitive way, and are increasingly used to support ex cathedra lecturing in scientific and engineering disciplines. Jupyter notebooks are particularly well-suited to implement them, but involve large amounts of ancillary code to process data and generate illustrations, which can distract students from the core learning outcomes. For a more engaging learning experience that only exposes relevant code to students, allowing them to focus on the interplay between code, theory and physical insights, we developed scicode-widgets (released as scwidgets), a Python package to build Jupyter-based applications. The package facilitates the creation of interactive exercises and demonstrations for students in any discipline in science, technology and engineering. Students are asked to provide pedagogically meaningful contributions in terms of theoretical understanding, coding ability, and analytical skills. The library provides the tools to connect custom pre- and post-processing of students' code, which runs seamlessly "behind the scenes", with the ability to test and verify the solution, as well as to convert it into live interactive visualizations driven by Jupyter widgets.