Preferred formats for training presentations?

[Graeme A Stewart]

Hi

I was asked to do a 90 minute introduction to Python as part of the INSIGHTS training program at CERN next week (https://indico.cern.ch/event/747653/overview). Notwithstanding that this isn’t really the best way to teach programming (much too ‘chalk and talk’), I was wondering what format people were preparing teaching materials like this in these days?

My criteria are that it should be fast to write, it should produce an attractive presentation, but also that it should be version controlled so that it can be shared, improved and adapted as part of our HSF materials.

The later really disfavours things like Google Slides or Powerpoint. The last time I did this (it was a very long time ago!) I used LaTeX with the propser class (I guess beamer is more popular these days?). I recall that being pretty painful to write and it produced ok output (again, beamer is probably better).

I started looking into reveal.js yesterday, which is nice, albeit it took a bit of time to realise how to bootstrap a presentation at all. I do like the 2-D presentation idea, horizontal all and vertical; something that closer matches concepts like mind maps.

Finally, I remembered only this morning about Jupyter notebook slides. That could be great (I wanted to do a notebook anyway, for the code examples), if it’s mature enough for the presentation side of things.

So, any experiences people have, good or bad, on these or other technical solutions?

Thanks a lot

Graeme

--

Graeme A Stewart  - CERN EP-SFT, 32-R-B08, x64462

[Stewart Martin-Haugh]

Hi Graeme,

Gilles Louppe generated some nice ML slides with markdown sources:

https://github.com/glouppe/info8010-deep-learning

Cheers,

Stewart

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[Giacomo Tenaglia]

On 09/11/2018 09:26 AM, Graeme A Stewart wrote:
> I started looking into reveal.js yesterday, which is nice, albeit it
> took a bit of time to realise how to bootstrap a presentation at all. I
> do like the 2-D presentation idea, horizontal all and vertical;
> something that closer matches concepts like mind maps.

Hi Graeme,
I've been using HackMD which embeds reveal.js and allows you to write
the slides in markdown which you could then dump in a git repo. We have
a hosted version at CERN, I've copy-pasted the HackMD demo slides, you
should be able to check and play (Menu → Slide mode for the presentation
view):

https://hackmd.web.cern.ch/Bgws1UHJT4aajbaKnoVtwA

Cheers,
Giacomo

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Giacomo Tenaglia
CERN IT Department
Mail & Collaborative Tools Services
http://phonebook.cern.ch/#id=PE671909

[Frank Gaede]

Hi Graeme,

I am using Markdown and pandoc for most of my talks with sources stored in a git repo.

It is very quick to write and has automatic syntax highlighting for code.
So if you are happy with the ‘out-of-the box-formatting’, I think it is perfectly suited for
a lecture on python…

As soon as you want to position lots of figures it becomes a bit more tedious. though.

Cheers, Frank.


------------------------------------
Dr. Frank Gaede
DESY - FLC
Phone: +49 40 8998 4382
Fax: +49 40 8994 4382
E-mail: frank...@desy.de

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[Giulio Eulisse]

Ciao,

if you feel lazy, but you like the "slides in markdown" approach you might also enjoy:

https://www.deckset.com

(I am not affiliated to it in any way, BTW). It's not free software but it gets the job done.

I've also an overleaf project at:

https://v2.overleaf.com/read/dtccbtwrbqfg

which compiles to my lightly customised metropolis beamer theme (CERN has overleaf enterprise support).

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Ciao,

Giulio

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[Peter Love]

Hi Graeme,

Check this https://asciinema.org/
And also the video courses done by these guys are pretty good in terms
of screencasts, although that format doesn't aid collaborative
improvement. It does scale though ;-)
https://pragmaticstudio.com/

Cheers,
Peter

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[Graeme A Stewart]

HI

Thanks everyone for this really interesting discussion. I learned a lot about what people are doing; however, now there seem to be about 6 different things to try instead of the two I started with yesterday :-)

That said, I think I will try the notebook solutions first, as having the code and teaching points integrated is a very significant bonus (albeit that notebooks don’t version control as well as we’d like, as Sebastien said (and was discussed in Sophie, I recall)).

Cheers

Graeme

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[Graeme A Stewart]

Hi All

Just to give a bit of feedback…

Jupyter + RISE did work very well in the end. Controlling the size of the slides is a bit fiddly, especially ones at the beginning where I had images in them (probably I could have used a smarter style sheet setting). OTOH not being able to just shrink the font size forces you to really think about what material is there and why. For screens of different resolutions knowing to zoom in and out in the browser’s full screen mode is important (the projector in Council Chamber was really great, which helped me). The facility to be able to live-type in the slides and execute the cells really was terrific. One notebook trick I learned was tagging cells that are expected to throw exceptions with "raises-exception” to prevent execution from stalling at that cell. I could not find that clearly documented anywhere.

Should anyone like to borrow from or comment on the material, it’s here:

https://github.com/graeme-a-stewart/python-introduction

(probably that should go to PyHEP gitter or the training list).

Thanks again to everyone for such a useful discussion.

Cheers

Graeme