Data-Driven Chemistry is a course aimed at 2nd year UG students in Chemistry in Scotland, but we have made the material available for everyone. It can be used for self study, or as a template for other instructors to duplicate or build on. Below we summarise how to best interact with the material for these two cases.
If you are a student working on the material independently, you can just work your way through each notebook.
The easiest way to do this is by using the provided Colab links. They should work out of the box with all necessarily packages installed. If you run into trouble sometimes restarting the runtime environment may simply solve this issue.
If you want to use a local isntallation, please follow the instructions on how to install necessary dependencies provided in the main README.md file.
In which ever way you load the notebooks, you will be able to execute cells and follow the explanations and instructions. Tasks are marked as such and will each provide a template solution in a drop down box. Any cells using the # FIXME tag means you are required to write code to answer the task.
Some cells currently show images of Mentimeter quizzes. These are used for in-class quizzes. You can look at them and think of an answer you may give, but are not essential the course. They are meant more as a guide for instructors to add should they so desire.
Some units contain extra notebooks for additional practice. These are less well curated than the core units and can be used for the curious, but do not contain essential material.
The material can be used in any way you like. Below we outline how to use it as is and incorporate additional features we have used in the course at Edinburgh. However, any part of it can be reused and adapted to your needs. If you tell us about how you found material useful we would appreciate this alot!
The best way to get started is to either cloning the repo and building up on it, or using the current repository as a template repository for your own or your organisations GitHub account.
Once you have a clone or template version of the repository you can edit the notebooks as you please. Follow the installation instructions in the README.md file for setting up a local installation. For reusing the material on Colab you will need to update the Colab links in the README.md file to reflect your new repository. The notebooks have been tested and should work out of the box. For any edits, make them locally, any commits them will make the changes available on Colab as well. Be carful to not break things with additional dependencies etc. The material can be changed and adjusted as you please, but see below for details on how to incorporate Mentimeter quizzes we have used.
The main thing that may need adjustment is the embedding of Mentimeter. If you want to use in-class quizzes we found Mentimeter a useful tool. Currently we have included screenshots of our mentimeter questions used. If you wanted to incorporate them into your course, you will need to create your own mentimeter account and create the questions within it (or create your own ones). You can also use our suggested images and simply We have prepared the mentimeter_example.ipynb notebook as an example on how to embed Mentimeters into markdown cells. All following notebooks will have images of Mentimeter questions embedded. Feel free to also just remove the cells containing the Mentimeter suggestions, if you do not find them useful.
Some units contain extra notebooks for additional practice. These are less well curated than the core units and can be used for the curious, but do not contain essential material. Feel free to adapt and incorpare these into any main parts of your teaching.
If you have any issues, or notice any errors please report them following these instructions and we will try and help address them.