Study on the use of a combination of IPython Notebook and an industry‐standard package in educating a CFD course

Abstract

It is common that industry‐standard packages are used in teaching professional engineering courses in final‐year undergraduate and postgraduate levels. To improve the competency of students in using such professional packages, it is important that students develop a good understanding of theoretical/fundamental concepts used on the packages. However, it is always a challenge to teach theoretical/fundamental concepts in the computational‐related courses. The teaching of such subjects can be improved by the use of advanced open‐source web applications. The present research proposes an approach based upon the combination of Jupyter Notebook and an industry‐standard package to teach an applied, computationally related course. We investigate the use of backward design and a novel tool called IPython (Jupyter) Notebook to redesign a postgraduate Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) course. IPython Notebook is used to design a series of integrated lecture slides and tutorial tasks, and also one of the assignments for the blended‐learning‐based, semester‐run, CFD course. The tool allows the implementation of backward curriculum design and a learn‐by‐doing approach in redesigning the course. The materials produced were used on the first part of the course which contributed 40% towards the course's final mark and delivered the fundamental concepts of CFD over the first half of the semester. The remaining 60% of the mark was based on a final project from the materials taught on using an industry‐standard CFD package in solving complex CFD problems during the second half of the semester. It was shown that the Ipython environment is a very useful tool which provides learning‐by‐doing practices allowing students to have a coherent integrated lecture, tutorial, and assignment material in a highly interactive way. It improved (a) students' engagement in teaching complex theoretical concepts, (b) students satisfaction of the course and (c) students performance in working with the industry‐standard package over the second half of the semester.

Mengapa Harus Menggunakan Laptop untuk Mengajar Matematika?

“…Notebook dapat menjadi alat yang ampuh untuk menyimpan pemikiran, ide, dan hasil penelitian siswa dan mendukung pengembangan pemahaman sains siswa (Wilmes & Siry, 2020). Menurut Seddighi et al (2020) laptop digunakan untuk merancang rangkaian slide kuliah terintegrasi dan tugas tutorial, serta salah satu tugas untuk kerja kelompok. Di Ryerson University ada perpustakaan peminjaman laptop yang dari tahun ke tahun pemakainya meningkat drastis.…”

Biotechnology data analysis training with Jupyter Notebooks

“…Several reports discuss problem-based learning and flipped classrooms in computational biology (15)(16)(17)(18). Also, Jupyter Notebooks are popular teaching resources in engineering (19,20) and guidelines for their setup are available (21,22). A particularly useful tool for motivation can be gamification and serious game elements (22,23), which contribute more strongly to positive self-assessment than exam results (24).…”

Biotechnology Data Analysis Training with Jupyter Notebooks

“…The Jupyter Notebook technology is an interactive Web-based tool that allows one to combine programming, computational output, explanatory text, and multimedia resources in a single browser-accessible document. Jupyter Notebooks are developed to facilitate data analysis and code sharing for Python ( 6 ) and are popular teaching resources, e.g., in engineering ( 23 , 24 ), with guidelines for their setup ( 19 , 25 ). Jupyter Notebooks are run on a server, a JupyterHub, that provides the Python computational environment, the Kernel.…”