Numpy Documentation: How-to content
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Greetings, This is Ryan Cooper (ME professor at University of Connecticut). I've been using Numpy in my mechanical engineering courses for years now, and I'd like to build resources for newcomers to Numpy. Here is my proposed contribution: Advise engineering students here at UConn to build How-to notebooks for Numpy applications. This would give the students some great experience communicating concepts and procedures to a broader community and it would help future users see how to use Numpy in different applications. Some How-to's that I had in mind would be: * Saving and loading Numpy arrays * Doing fast fourier transform (FFT) on time-series data to find natural frequencies * Solving linear sets of equations for circuits or another linear system with linear algebra * using eigenvalues for natural frequency calculations I'm open to other suggestions. These are some of the applications that I have current students doing in engineering work. My question is: Would these How-to's be appopriate for the "Numpy Tutorials" (https://github.com/numpy/numpy-tutorials) repo? My personal opinion is that How-to's are easier to organize and curate (for Numpy) and easier to write (for students). Best Regards, Ryan Ryan C. Cooper, Ph. D. Assistant Professor-in-Residence University of Connecticut Mechanical Engineering Department Engineering II, room 314 191 Auditorium rd Storrs, CT 06269 email: ryan.c.cooper@uconn.edu
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This sounds fantastic. In what context would the students be creating the notebooks -- as part of one of your existing ME courses, as a for-credit project, as a supervised but non-credit project? What were your thoughts on submission workflow? You review initially, then the student directly submits a PR? Suppose several students want to create a notebook on the same topic. Would you steer them to another topic, allow them to work independently and both submit (and we merge best of both), urge them to collaborate? Were you planning to keep the mechanical engineering context for these problems, or present abstractly? (I myself would like to see the application left intact. It doesn't obscure the steps, and I love the brothers-and-sisters-under-the-skin glimpse of how other domains make use of the same tools I do.)
easier to organize and...write
I agree. Pedagogical soundness is also a plus. Procida says "what you ask the beginner to do [in a tutorial] must work" (https://documentation.divio.com/tutorials/). That means, among other things, that we need to specify a single environment to run the tutorial in. Notebook is the all-around win for this.
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/f671a75acea3c74f269e377e8cfaf030.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
This sounds fantastic. In what context would the students be creating the notebooks -- as part of one of your existing ME courses, as a for-credit project, as a supervised but non-credit project? What were your thoughts on submission workflow? You review initially, then the student directly submits a PR? Suppose several students want to create a notebook on the same topic. Would you steer them to another topic, allow them to work independently and both submit (and we merge best of both), urge them to collaborate? Were you planning to keep the mechanical engineering context for these problems, or present abstractly? (I myself would like to see the application left intact. It doesn't obscure the steps, and I love the brothers-and-sisters-under-the-skin glimpse of how other domains make use of the same tools I do.)
easier to organize and...write
I agree. Pedagogical soundness is also a plus. Procida says "what you ask the beginner to do [in a tutorial] must work" (https://documentation.divio.com/tutorials/). That means, among other things, that we need to specify a single environment to run the tutorial in. Notebook is the all-around win for this.
participants (2)
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Ben Nathanson
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Cooper, Ryan