MOON: Assisting Students in Completing Educational Notebook Scenarios

Jupyter notebooks are increasingly being adopted by teachers to deliver interactive practical sessions to their students. Notebooks come with many attractive features, such as the ability to combine textual explanations, multimedia content, and executable code alongside a flexible execution model which encourages experimentation and exploration. However, this execution model can quickly become an issue when students do not follow the intended execution order of the teacher, leading to errors or misleading results that hinder their learning. To counter this adverse effect, teachers usually write detailed instructions about how students are expected to use the notebooks. Yet, the use of digital media is known to decrease reading efficiency and compliance with written instructions, resulting in frequent notebook misuse and students getting lost during practical sessions. In this article, we present a novel approach, MOON, designed to remedy this problem. The central idea is to provide teachers with a language that enables them to formalize the expected usage of their notebooks in the form of a script and to interpret this script to guide students with visual indications in real time while they interact with the notebooks. We evaluate our approach using a randomized controlled experiment involving 21 students, which shows that MOON helps students comply better with the intended scenario without hindering their ability to progress. Our follow-up user study shows that about 75% of the surveyed students perceived MOON as rather useful or very useful.

I. Introduction

Teachers are increasingly using Jupyter notebooks as a support for educational activities such as graded assignments [1]–[3], interactive textbooks [4], interactive exercise worksheets, or live coding [5]. The primary advantage of a notebook lies in its ability to gather all the essential tools within a single platform. This allows teachers to provide students with an interactive document that includes text and instructions, as well as executable code, images, and videos. The advantages of using notebooks in an educational context are assessed not only in scientific disciplines such as physics [6], [7], chemistry [8]–[12], mathematics [13] or computational sciences [14]–[17], but also in other disciplines such as humanities for example [18].