Nick Arner 2022-03-08 17:53:30 yeT 2022-03-08 20:35:14 woah! the possibility for speeding up the dev environment setup process/just getting dependencies figured here is really cool! ditto to testing before downloading and just code sharing in general. The say hello world made me jump a little was not ready for that in this quiet room
Maikel van de Lisdonk 2022-03-10 16:55:22 Hi, this week I gave a talk at a frontend meetup about webassembly from the perspective of the visual webassembly compiler that I am building. My talk is the second talk and you can watch here if you're interested https://youtu.be/2sch8NI2qUY
Jayaram Kancherla 2022-03-10 22:17:18 long time lurker here, but the last post on webassembly convinced me to post this 🙂 We recently built an application to analyze and explore single-cell rna-seq data fully in the browser using webassembly. If there are other lurking bioinformaticians/curious on what we did, checkout the application. I’d love to hear what you think! All the underlying code and packages are open source!
https://twitter.com/jayaram/status/1480599647039016962?s=20&t=_SK2Cfw5BBo0GY3J0VX-GQ
taowen 2022-03-11 00:09:57 Cole Lawrence 2022-03-13 02:36:55 Awesome work! Thanks for sharing. I think we may actually have a good use case for looking into this soon for one of my projects. I heard that this is similar to how Figma's Plugin system works
Corey Montella 2022-03-11 16:25:39 A student did a presentation yesterday about his work on Mech, and he surprised me by giving what amounted to one of the most detailed looks into Mech so far. I turned his presentation in to a little video attached below. Keep in mind, Mech is still very early and there's no error messages, yet he demoed this in one take live in front of the class. It's the programming-demo equivalent to pitching a no hitter imo. I was very impressed! If anyone out there has job openings consider Haocheng!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNvTTd6rp3w
Jason Morris 2022-03-11 16:40:46 Nice work. Working on a demo for work this afternoon. Appreciate the inspiration!
Jack Rusher 2022-03-13 07:10:40 Another Clerk demo! This time it's @Sam Ritchie showing what happens when you combine a port of scmutils to Clojure with Mathbox in a Clerk notebook. One can write mathematical functions in Clojure that are graphed in Clerk with automatic translation of functions from source code to typeset mathematics using KaTex. I find this is fairly exciting from the perspective of maths/EE/physics pedagogy. 🙂
/cc Konrad Hinsen
https://www.loom.com/share/324ed39cd3a84ff4bc045a75a0f91482
Konrad Hinsen 2022-03-13 08:28:29 There's a lot of potential for "malleable scientific visualization" there! And not just for teaching. Looking forward to @Sam Ritchie talk/demo at ELS, assuming it will be recorded.
Sam Ritchie 2022-03-13 14:01:06 The Bag of Tricks is coming together. I can tell I am going to need some help on visual design here, and how to present these elements together, what the defaults should be for these functions viewers…
but EVEN without the physics extension here there is exciting potential for interactive “explainables”. Like, my long namespace building up these incremental polynomial interpolation routines. would be great to “prove” that they work with a visual interface where you can click in new points and watch the polynomial snap over.
Or graphing N polynomials to show that a taylor series polynomial converges to a function in a spot
Konrad Hinsen 2022-03-13 15:13:01 @Sam Ritchie The main issue with teaching anything computational is making the environment available to students in a form that (1) all students can get to run quickly and (2) is sufficiently uniform among students that teachers can provide meaningful technical help. 100% in-browser tools are everyone's preference (it was the main motivation for the development of JupyterLite https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite), even if their UX is otherwise less than optimal.
Judging from your demos, probably the best way to package them is to put everything but the browser into a Docker container. But that means that students must be able to run Docker. And if the editor inside the container is Emacs, teachers will have to teach some Emacs.
Sam Ritchie 2022-03-13 15:13:32 We could also get a Nextjournal style fully browser based thing going
Sam Ritchie 2022-03-13 15:16:42 Martin Henz (creator of SA from the National University of Singapore) did the JS port of SICP; we're going to try and get sicmutils running in this environment, which would let all of the in browser stuff plus the GitHub Classroom integration work
Sam Ritchie 2022-03-13 15:18:25 Konrad Hinsen less Clerk in that now, but would love to know if that style of environment feels better for teaching. They have good support too for pairing in the browser, publishing homework and they have things LIKE clerk for viewers… the bones are there. Anyway would love feedback on if that integration is worthwhile to pursue
Sam Ritchie 2022-03-13 15:27:11 Konrad Hinsen the current stuff will at least work with any editor, I just happen to be using emacs but clerk doesn’t care who edits the files. Files existing is the one constraint I think?
Konrad Hinsen 2022-03-13 19:48:48 OK, if any editor works, then the only specific software would be the server running Clojure. That could easily go into a Docker container, but then students have to invoke the right magic for file sharing.
Konrad Hinsen 2022-03-13 19:52:35 Source Academy looks interesting, but I will have to take a closer look before commenting. Cloud-based environments are definitely interesting for teaching, at the very least because they let the teacher centralize software configuration and guarantee a shared environment for everyone. Nextjournal would offer that as well. Evolving Nextjournal towards a teaching platform could be a worthwhile project independently of your specific SICM work. There's a lot of interest in platforms for computer-aided teaching, for many domains.
Jack Rusher 2022-03-13 20:37:50 We're looking at a re-vamp of maria.cloud sometime this year, which will likely also involve merging more of Clerk's features into that purely web-based environment (with extra goodies).
