Embedding sagecell.sagemath.org vs Setting Up a Dedicated Server vs CoCalc

[Chris Diaz]

Hello,

I'm interested in using Sage Cells for an upcoming open textbook project, and I'm not sure if using https://sagecell.sagemath.org/ to embed cells on our HTML textbook would be OK, or if that website simply intended for testing / demo purposes. Are there terms of use or a limitations to using the public sagecell.sagemath.org server (i.e. number of cells used, number of calculations, etc.)?

At this stage, we're looking to create Sage Cells for simple algebraic calculations students can do as they read the text. It seems that embedding would the simplest path forward. We're not looking to collect any student activity information or integrate with a learning management system. At what point would be recommended we either set up our own server for Sage Math Cells or use CoCalc services?

Thanks,

Chris

[Andrey Novoseltsev]

Our terms of use and limitations are "best efforts without guarantees", i.e. we hope that the service will work well for you and we strive to make this happen, but if something unexpected happens, the service may be unavailable or unstable for a while.

My recommendation is to use your own server or paid projects on CoCalc if you want to assign homework that requires the use of Sage, even more so - if you are going to run exams using Sage. In this case you want to make sure that a) your students won't overload server capacity and b) no unexpected maintenance or downtime happens during exam/deadline.

For using a textbook public servers should work just fine - you are not expecting a large number of simultaneous users and even if something goes wrong, it is not a big deal to try a bit later.

Hope this helps!

Andrey

[Ingo Dahn]

Hi, Chris,

I can confirm that SageCell is an excellent and highly responsive and reliable choice for your purpose as long as you don't wanto to receive student modifications of your cells or work in critical situations like timed assessments or hands-on workshops. But it should be fine for homework support. 

I have been using SageCell over years in various forms for educational purposes as support for or embedded in assessments and in interactive websites set up with ExeLearning. Since I couldn't get CoCalc up and running in my Ubuntu/Nginx/Plesk environment I set up a simple way to re-activate static HTML pages exported from CoCalc notebooks by replacing their code fragments with SageCells.

I'd be interested to share experiences!

Ingo

[kcrisman]

Dear Chris,

In addition to Andrey and Ingo's suggestions, I want to suggest that a possible solution for *easily* embedding Sage cells is PreTeXt (https://pretextbook.org).    If you click "Catalog" you will see a host of already-existing open texts, some of which have quite a bit of Sage cell content used in exactly the way you propose.  These all use the public server for now, as far as I know.

Karl-Dieter

[Chris Diaz]

Thanks for the quick replies, everyone! This is very exciting news. Thanks so much, Andrey, for providing this service. I'm coming from a background of using Bookdown, so I'm slowly learning about how individual pieces within the SageMathCells / CoCalc / PreTexT world co-exist. It's a huge bonus to know there's an active, supportive community here.

-Chris 

[kcrisman]

Thanks for the quick replies, everyone! This is very exciting news. Thanks so much, Andrey, for providing this service. I'm coming from a background of using Bookdown, so I'm slowly learning about how individual pieces within the SageMathCells / CoCalc / PreTexT world co-exist. It's a huge bonus to know there's an active, supportive community here.

Bookdown/Rmd is a great resource as well, and obviously some great people have written books with it - and presumably using Shiny or other capabilities those could be "live" as well.  PreTeXt has somewhat different goals - and in some ways more functionality, e.g. bookdown says "Currently the index is only supported for LaTeX/PDF output." and in other ways less, e.g. Epub may still have a few rough edges.  But I encourage you to find out more at the pretext-support Google group.