Academic Technology, Development, Learning Technology, Open-Source, Software

Jupyter @ Swarthmore

Did you know that Swarthmore College has a JupyterHub installation that allows you to work on and save your Jupyter Notebooks in the cloud?

What is a Jupyter Notebook?

A Jupyter Notebook is a computing environment that enables the author to write content containing interactive code, videos, charts, and pretty much anything else the Jupyter kernel (In Swarthmore’s case, Python) provides.

What can I do with a Jupyter Notebook?

  • Run and edit code in the browser
  • See the results of computation through rich media representations such as HTML, PNG, SVG, PDF, etc.
  • Create narrative text using Markdown

More about Jupyter Notebooks

A Jupyter Notebook is composed of blocks called cells. Each cell can have a different type. They will most commonly have a type of Markdown or Code. In the example below, the top cell is a Markdown cell while the bottom is Code cell.

A Markdown cell and a code cell from a Jupyter notebook

Within your notebook, you can do things like import libraries, visualize data, and even share your created notebooks with others.

An example of how a Jupyter Notebook can be used to import data

Using Jupyter Notebooks (with a combination of the matplotlib library) it becomes almost trivial to visualize large datasets

Pokemon (Gen 1 – 7) plotted by their base stats

Jupyter Notebooks are a great option for instructors!

With Juptyer Notebooks, the instructor can release a version of the notebook with instructions written in markdown to their students. The students can then follow along interactively, or submit their notebooks for grading (via Moodle, git, etc).

An example notebook with instructions may look something like the following

While a completed notebook may look like this

A (partially) answered Jupyter Notebook

You can view the full example notebooks at https://github.com/Swarthmore/example-jupyter-notebooks or by clicking the following to access them directly

The following packages are available for use on all Swarthmore-hosted Jupyter notebooks

Jupyter Tips & Tricks

  • You can use shift + return to run the current cell of your Notebook, and start a new one.
  • Pressing tab will invoke the notebook’s autocompletion feature
  • You can press Esc 00 to quickly restart your notebook
  • Jupyter notebooks have a command and an edit mode. When your cursor is active inside a cell, you are in edit mode. You can switch to command mode by pressing Esc
  • In edit mode, press Ctrl + Shift + - to split the current cell
  • In command mode, press Shift + M to merge the selected cells
  • In command mode, you can delete the current cell by typing dd
  • Jupyter notebooks run in GitHub!

More Reading

For access to Swarthmore’s hosted Jupyter notebooks, please contact the Swarthmore help desk