In my course, “Look Ma, No Calculator,” students and teachers alike, will learn how to use Jupyter Notebooks for free in the cloud instead of using expensive graphing calculators in their course work! Students can use Jupyter Notebooks to complete classwork and homework in Math and Science classes and easily check their work. Teachers can use Jupyter Notebooks to plan their Math and Science lessons and deliver lessons in their classrooms coding on the fly with their students.
We will be using a free version of Jupyter Notebooks called Colab which is integrated with Google Drive. You can save all your code on Google Drive in special *ipynb (interactive python notebook) files which run live. In other words all your input and output is automatically saved as you type and can easily be edited, shared and re-evaluated as needed.
You will learn how to use Jupyter Notebooks as an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) on the Google Computer Platform (GCP) using Markdown and Coding cells. Markdown cells use Latex and HTML to produce professionally typeset formulas and text as is found in scholarly journals and textbooks. Coding cells use standard Python for arithmetic and graphing in addition to the SYMPY package for symbolic calculations as a Computer Algebra System (CAS). The cell paradigm is similar to that used by Mathematica or MATLAB.