The problem

I have always found the standard way of teaching just via textbooks soo limiting. When I was trying to understand the principles behind shape functions in FEM, 3D visualization tools were of great help. I wish to teach the students in the way I have learned, but I also understand that it is a very daunting task for students - who are not well versed in the field of programming - to code stuff on their own. That is why I find Jupyter notebooks really interesting and a solution to my problem.

I am writing this post as I am creating this repository to help a student with FEM.

Benefits of Jupyter notebook

  • Allows to write the theory of the problem with actual code execution. See here.
  • Is easy to work with in Windows, Linux or MAC.
  • Could be rendered online and thus shared with the whole class.
  • Supports 2D as well as 3D graphs. Also, supports interactive graphs.
  • Since it is based on python, learning in Jupyter opens up a whole new world of applications for the student.

How to make a tutorial in Jupyter

  • Make the repository in Github in which you wish to keep all your tutorials.

  • Add a README.ipynb file to the repo and keep it in sync with the actual README.md file.

  • Load your README.ipynb in nbviewer.

  • Get the link to your rendered notebook and paste it in the Github repo README.md.

  • Now, keep both the README.ipynb and README.md files updated with the source code. Think of it as an index for your tutorials.

  • For every problem that you add to the repo, update the Contents with a link to that file. You need to adjust the link as follows

    Github URL: - https://github.com/iitrabhi/fem/blob/main/README.ipynb

    Nbviewer URL:-https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/iitrabhi/fem/blob/main/README.ipynb

    In your GitHub url, you need to just change github.com to nbviewer.jupyter.org/github

  • Update both the README.md as well as README.ipynb

References