TeachBooks Poster JupyterCon 2025

Abstract

Poster presented at JupyterCon 2025 in San Diego, California, November 4-6. Additional information is provided here to help understand our community and tools. In addition to what's written on the poster, the easiest way to understand TeachBooks by visiting our website or reading this GitHub Issue, which explains TeachBooks in detail for the perspective of the Jupyter Book community. In addition, after reading the poster or reviewing the "offerings" on our website, the easiest way to explore what TeachBooks offers is to use our Template Book. In only 10 clicks you will have your own TeachBook, which comes with a number of our favorite tools and features pre-installed and ready to go. In fact, the Template Book comes with a large number of exercises to guide you through our tools and how to use them. In addition, we recommend you check out the following: Our TeachBooks Manual provides guidance targeted at specific user types (no prior experience with programming or Git required!). This is possible by supporting a 100% browser-based editing experience and defining the TeachBooks Workflow to guide users on how to collaborate with others online. As teachers, we often found ourselves needing to draft materials collaboratively, but release them to students in a tightly controlled manner. Often we could not rely on our colleagues to build a book on their personal computers to check draft materials, so our solution was to devise a way to edit and review materials entirely in the browser. The Deploy Book Workflow is a GitHub Actions workflow that enables a book to be built and deployed on any (or all) branches in a repository. It includes fine-grained control of the URL structure to enable various use cases, for example: "draft" and "release" branches for preparing materials or creating annual versions of a book in one repo (e.g., `my_org.github.io/book/2025/...` and `.../2024/...`). As teachers of engineers and scientist, we often want students to learn programming along with the methematical and physics-based topics in our courses. To accomodate this in our books we customized the Sphinx Thebe extension with a number of cell tags to make the student experience as smooth as possible, and guide teachers how to use it. Our Manual contains a number of examples illustrating how we have leveraged these tools in our education. Curious in learning more? Questions? Don't hesitate to get in touch! Try one of the following: GitHub Discussions Email us at [email protected] Sign up for our newsletter here (infrequent email updates about new tools, issues, etc.) Interested in contributing? We love making Sphinx extensions and always have a few "in the works." Get in touch if you have ideas. Make a PR to any of our repositories. Get in touch if you would like to help out with some of these more involved projects, which we have already started developing with students: a WYSIWYG editor for MyST Markdown (see GitHub repo here); TeachBooks Annotator (Google Chrome extension) that supports highlighting, annotation and exporting/importing notes (GH repo here).