I think it's important to distinguish user groups. No solution is best for all of them.
For scientists or data analysts, jupyter notebooks are a great choice since they mirror the professional and research tools they'll use.
For web development, an in-browser IDE like Cloud9 would be my choice to get an arbitrary room of adults up to speed.
But for middle or high school audiences, or even adult beginners, solutions like the above are far too complex. It's easy to get a certain expert blindness, but a Jupyter notebook for instance can actually be a huge problem form someone trying to understand flow of control, since you can execute code blocks in an arbitrary order into the same runtime.
Tradeoffs between power and usability abound. Jupyter is a good blend. A full IDE is power. Skulpt prioritizes usability. Some group of users fits into each of these buckets.
So (surprise, surprise!) The meanings of 'best' and 'terrible' are highly dependent upon specific user needs.
> Jupyter notebook for instance can actually be a huge problem form someone trying to understand flow of control, since you can execute code blocks in an arbitrary order into the same runtime.
True. I usually don't let them know they can create several cells first. They use only one for a good part of the show.
Skulpt will lead to strange debugging sessions, and you really, really want them to learn how to debug autonomously asap. So having the same stacktrace in every env is very important.
I'm a co-founder of Trinket and thought I'd explain why we chose Skulpt.
Client-side execution lets you do visual things that would be slow and complicated (maybe practically impossible) if you ran them server side. Visual results are one of the most important motivators for students learning to code.
Take our Sense HAT emulator, made in partnership with Raspberry Pi:
This uses 3D CSS and SVG to make a virtual Raspberry Pi that you can rotate around. The Sense HAT has a gyroscope, accelerometer, etc that kids can actually program to respond to these movements.
The alternative to this emulator was the Raspberry Pi Foundation sending boxes of computers to classrooms (which they still do). But the emulator makes this scalable while also synergizing with the computers: kids can download their code and run it on the real device if they want.
The next phase in the project is letting kids run their code in space. Mission Zero uses the emulator to let European kids get their code run on one of the Raspberry Pis in orbit on the International Space Station:
Why not Brython or RapydScript? Theoretically, either could do most of this.
Skulpt is designed for the needs of teachers and learners. Those projects have slightly different goals (making Python a web scripting language and providing a Pythonic way to write JS, respectively) which may make them a better fit for your project but we've found Skulpt to meet our users' needs the best. Our users are teachers and students in middle and high school, and some undergrads, who want to write, run, and share programs and websites as quickly and easily as possible. They need reasonable speed, fidelity to Python and lots of fun visuals. Turtle, Matplotlib, and now the Sense HAT emulator provide the visuals.
Skulpt isn't perfect but it's got a great community and is getting better all the time. I think it's the clear best choice if your users are teaching or learning. And projects like Anvil (anvil.works) show how the project can work outside of education as well, in that case for non-specialist business analysts/ops people who would otherwise be stringing together spreadsheets.
I can second this sentiment. Meredydd and Albert Jan have made a good deal of Skulpt's most technically interesting features (which in turn enable a more seamless user experience). I'm a cofounder of Trinket and we knew early on that this project was something we would use heavily and wanted to support. We support more languages now (including server side Python, Java, and with R coming soon) but our skulpt-based free Python trinket remains our most popular one.
Our users have benefitted hugely from contributions by Meredydd, Albert Jan, Michael Ebert, Marie Chatfield, Scott Rixner, Brad Miller, and a whole bunch of other contributors. Go team!
I'm a big fan of datacamp. You should definitely give this a try. It would be great to expand the reach of your lessons without the infrastructure overhead of every user hitting your server with their code. Hit up the skulpt dev listserve if you want some help. Or I'm at elliott@trinket.io.
Plug: you could easily prototype this with Trinket embeds. Add #!/bin/python3 to the top of our Python (Skulpt) trinkets to get strict Py3 mode. Add data files via the + button (no directory support, so treat them as all in the local directory). Use the Share menu to get embed code. Paste. You've got your first interactive lesson. If your users like it, you can then decide whether and how to build skulpt in to the site.
Thanks for the pointers, I'll definitely have to take another look at trinket.io! It would be cool to try some exercise submission + feedback with code highlighting all on the client side.
I second pretty much everything in here.In my meeting we were essentially working together grooming a github issue- I could imagine that issue being addable as a tab behind or instead of the notepad.
This is part of something I hope takes hold in CS education: ontogenous education. Ontogeny is the study of the development of organisms throughout their lifecycle. Technology develops in a way that often makes the present as dissimilar from its roots as a caterpillar and butterfly. So by starting at the beginning (or a beginning at least), rather than the present we give kids a full grasp of why things are the way they are rather than the millions of other ways they could be.
For many learners technology is a turn-off because it seems 'arbitrary'. It is, in the same sense that a biological organism or historical event is arbitrary. It's only with context that these things start to become intelligible. So ontogenous CS education is about giving a historical context to modern technology.
I agree with this sentiment. Do you have any good recommendations for books on the history computer science? Lots of options available, but I'm looking for a technical overview of the subject.
