On Mon, 6 Nov 2017 19:12:39 +1000 Nick Coghlan ncoghlan@gmail.com wrote:
I suppose an alternative is to set up jupyterhub
https://jupyterhub.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
and let all your students just access that from a webbrowser.
Yep, and lots of teachers use services like PythonAnywhere, trinket.io, and similar, precisely because the only thing the learners need locally is a web browser. The main downside is that learning that way isn't quite as transferable a skill, since it completely hides the code packaging and distribution step. However, it's a good option when the primary aim is to teach computational skills, and Python is just the vehicle used for that purpose.
Software Carpentry starts out with the Anaconda distribution, as it not only improves the cross-platform UX consistent situation, it also deals with the external binary dependency problem (at least for the core set of packages provided either natively or via conda-forge).
And it's quite a large set of core packages there too :-)
(disclaimer: I work for Anaconda Inc, though not on the Anaconda distribution)
Regards
Antoine.