Every research area is confronting torrents of data arriving with increasing velocity, volume, and variety. The unprecedented scales of data, the accelerating pace of its accumulation, and disappearing disciplinary boundaries bring exciting research and development opportunities but also challenge traditional graduate education. A central challenge for virtually every discipline is ensuring students have the computational skills needed for increasingly data-intensive research and necessary for a competitive and rapidly evolving job market. Across the biological, physical, and social sciences, one common approach to addressing this challenge is to create bootcamps, which are introductory short courses for new graduate students. This National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) award in the Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) Track to the University of California - San Diego will expand on the bootcamp approach and simultaneously exploit the growing movement for the creation of computational notebooks by augmenting Jupyter Notebook, a web-based notebook with novel online facilities for data-centric programming training for graduate students in a wide range of disciplines. This has the potential to improve the efficacy of training graduate students in data-centric programming and expand its impact by making new instructional facilities widely available via the web.
Building on open-source Jupyter Notebook software and widely deployed educational tools the investigators have developed to support tutoring (Python Tutor), feedback (PeerStudio), discussion (Talkabout), and activity capture (ChronoViz), the project will augment Jupyter Notebook to assist in training new graduate students in data-centric programming. This project will iteratively design, pilot, and evaluate the augmented notebooks and associated new companion curricula in bootcamps and ongoing classes to validate the approach, and make the resulting system, tailored to specific discipline requirements, available online to be widely shared, evolved, and extended in bootcamps, graduate classes, and online courses. In addition, project members will participate in the UC San Diego STARS (Summer Training for Academic Research Success) outreach program and involve high school students from the innovative Preuss School on campus and other high schools in the area. To extend impact beyond publication, education, and local outreach, project members will work closely with the Project Jupyter team to form a community to further develop and evolve this approach for training students in data-centric programming and help fulfill the promise that increased sharing of data and analyses holds for advancing open scientific collaboration and reproducible science.
The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new, potentially transformative models for STEM graduate education training. The Innovations in Graduate Education Track is dedicated solely to piloting, testing, and evaluating novel, innovative, and potentially transformative approaches to graduate education.
