Fwd: Making YouTube interactive with Jupyter notebooks and SageCells

[kcrisman]

FYI cross-posting from sage-cell

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: ingo...@gmail.com <Unknown>
Date: Sunday, January 29, 2023 at 4:49:34 PM UTC-5
Subject: Making YouTube interactive with Jupyter notebooks and SageCells
To: sage-cell <Unknown>

I am glad to release Youpyter - a free online tool to augment YouTube videos with interactive html. An example of a synchronized Khan Academy video on gradients is available at this page..

YouTube hosts many excellent educational videos. These videos are particularly useful to illustrate processes in science, in particular explaining the development of ideas. Often these videos are produced as screencasts with great effort.

But educational videos suffer from some constraints by the medium. The screen area is limited and needs to be erased frequently. Finding the location of a particular explanation in a video can involve a lot of rewind/pause/forward cycles - searching in a video is not easy.

Math adds formulas as another complication. Complicated formulas occupy much of the screen, in particular if they are hand-written on a tablet or electronic whiteboard. Also, for the narrator of the video, formulas are hard to explain.

However, the most important limitation of videos from an educational perspective, is its lack of interactivity. The viewer doesn't get any feedback and therefore cannot verify whether the content has been understood.

Some attempts have been made to combine interactive web elements with video for educational purposes. These are limited in the supported kinds of interactivity or they require for their production specialised software or programming skills. 

Youpyter generates interactive web pages that are synchronized with a YouTube video from annotated Jupyter notebooks, converting code cells of the notebook into linked SageCells that can be edited before evaluation. 

Students may save their edited pages and upload them to their LMS for evaluation. They can use the SageCells to apply the knowledge presented in the video to examples of their own interests, while the video may be limted to one or a few toy examples.

The Jupyter notebook, from which the above page for the Khan video on gradients has been generated, is available as an example on CoCalc.

Source code of Youpyter is available on GitHub.

Note that this is the first release and should be considered experimental. Your feedback will be very much appreciated.

I'd like to add a reminder that a related online conversion of Jupyter notebooks to web pages with SageCells is available as NotebookPlayer.

I hope that that this may be of some use

Ingo Dahn