4 ms·

As shameless self promotion, if you’re interested in writing computational lessons for a course, check out Pathbird (pathbird.com), a SaaS product for creating

As shameless self promotion, if you’re interested in writing computational lessons for a course, check out Pathbird (pathbird.com), a SaaS product for creating guided computational lessons (targeted mostly towards university faculty right now but feel free to reach out if you’re interested). We took a lot of inspiration from Jupyter Book (and use Jupyter kernels under the hood), so nothing but respect for all things Jupyter.

jcater 5y ago
This is interesting. I’ve been tinkering with using Jupyter Notebooks for our somewhat intensive onboarding of new engineers. Is Pathbird solely focused on the education market? Is there pricing info anywhere?
- travisd 5y ago
  The original version of it was developed while teaching a data science course for non-CS grad students at the University of Michigan so most of our early efforts has been focused on the education market. My co-founder/advisor/UMich-professor has been using it to teach some courses outside UMich as well (namely https://pathbird.com/compml https://pathbird.com/compml which is a very high quality math-focused DS course), so there's some precedent for it. If you're so inclined, feel free to shoot me an email (travis at pathbird.com) and I'd be happy to discuss things.
  - diskzero 5y ago
    Pathbird looks really interesting. I am trying to understand what the main product is. One can design a curriculum and the lesson content is hosted in a Jupyter Notebook? If you were designing a course to teach a language, that language would have to be supported by Jupyter?
    - travisd 5y ago
      Thanks for the questions! It’s not the Jupyter notebook (or lab) frontend, it’s a custom webapp built for learning and specifically around exercise based, guided learning. So a student will go through exercises (mostly multiple choice and code-based “autograded” exercises) to check their understanding and guide them through a lesson. This style of learning tends to work best with interactive languages (Julia and Python and R at present). Theoretically we could support other languages with Jupyter kernels (including Go and C++, etc) as well. I wonder how well those languages would work in this context considering it’s a bit hard to be “iterative” with those (but consider than a challenge rather than a limitation!). Feel free to reach out with any questions/comments/concerns and I can answer in more long form!
gavinray 5y ago
I think it's cool that your homepage uses Julia code as an example for cell content: "Derivative of sigmoid function" function dsigmoid(z::Number) return ?? end Wish you best of luck in your endeavors, seems like it has value and was born out of practical purposes
sireat 5y ago
Where is the option to create a new course in Pathbird? I registered but only get an option to join an existing course with a code. I write a lot of Jupyter notebooks at my main job and I also lecture at a university thus Pathbird seems relevant.
- travisd 5y ago
  It’s currently “invite only” for instructors (mostly just to prevent abuse of the computational resources for, eg, crypto mining). If you shoot me a quick email (travis@pathbird.com) I’d be happy to set you up with a course. You can demo the student experience with code JULIACON2020 as well.
dang 5y ago
Once you have a publicly accessible demo, you should definitely make a Show HN of this! See https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638, https://news.ycombinator.com/yli.html https://news.ycombinator.com/yli.html for more info. (The last link gives instructions for YC startups launching on HN, but the basic principles apply more generally.) Email hn@ycombinator.com if you want us to look over a draft (the same offer goes for anyone) - just please realize that we can't necessarily respond quickly; it depends on how brutal the inbox is that week/month.

jcater 5y ago

This is interesting. I’ve been tinkering with using Jupyter Notebooks for our somewhat intensive onboarding of new engineers. Is Pathbird solely focused on the education market? Is there pricing info anywhere?

travisd 5y ago
The original version of it was developed while teaching a data science course for non-CS grad students at the University of Michigan so most of our early efforts has been focused on the education market. My co-founder/advisor/UMich-professor has been using it to teach some courses outside UMich as well (namely https://pathbird.com/compml https://pathbird.com/compml which is a very high quality math-focused DS course), so there's some precedent for it. If you're so inclined, feel free to shoot me an email (travis at pathbird.com) and I'd be happy to discuss things.
- diskzero 5y ago
  Pathbird looks really interesting. I am trying to understand what the main product is. One can design a curriculum and the lesson content is hosted in a Jupyter Notebook? If you were designing a course to teach a language, that language would have to be supported by Jupyter?
  - travisd 5y ago
    Thanks for the questions! It’s not the Jupyter notebook (or lab) frontend, it’s a custom webapp built for learning and specifically around exercise based, guided learning. So a student will go through exercises (mostly multiple choice and code-based “autograded” exercises) to check their understanding and guide them through a lesson. This style of learning tends to work best with interactive languages (Julia and Python and R at present). Theoretically we could support other languages with Jupyter kernels (including Go and C++, etc) as well. I wonder how well those languages would work in this context considering it’s a bit hard to be “iterative” with those (but consider than a challenge rather than a limitation!). Feel free to reach out with any questions/comments/concerns and I can answer in more long form!

gavinray 5y ago

I think it's cool that your homepage uses Julia code as an example for cell content: "Derivative of sigmoid function" function dsigmoid(z::Number) return ?? end Wish you best of luck in your endeavors, seems like it has value and was born out of practical purposes

sireat 5y ago

Where is the option to create a new course in Pathbird? I registered but only get an option to join an existing course with a code. I write a lot of Jupyter notebooks at my main job and I also lecture at a university thus Pathbird seems relevant.

travisd 5y ago
It’s currently “invite only” for instructors (mostly just to prevent abuse of the computational resources for, eg, crypto mining). If you shoot me a quick email (travis@pathbird.com) I’d be happy to set you up with a course. You can demo the student experience with code JULIACON2020 as well.

dang 5y ago

Once you have a publicly accessible demo, you should definitely make a Show HN of this! See https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638, https://news.ycombinator.com/yli.html https://news.ycombinator.com/yli.html for more info. (The last link gives instructions for YC startups launching on HN, but the basic principles apply more generally.) Email hn@ycombinator.com if you want us to look over a draft (the same offer goes for anyone) - just please realize that we can't necessarily respond quickly; it depends on how brutal the inbox is that week/month.