Running VPython on CoCalc

[Claudine Allen]

Dear VPython team,

I had a really great first experience using VPython in a Jupyter Notebook for demos and homeworks in my solid state physics distance course, thank you for this awesome tool! I recommended to students who did not have a fast enough computer at home to use the cloud computing platform CoCalc. It lists VPython as a supported library in the Sagemath environment, but we cannot get it to work. We’re ok at this point as students work in teams, but I have to change strategy for individual assignments if it is not an easy fix...

I’m not entirely sure if I should fully report this issue here or to the CoCalc community, thanks for letting me know.

Sincerely,

Claudine Allen

[Bruce Sherwood]

As far as I know, VPython has never worked in CoCalc, nor do we know how to make it work there. 

Bruce

[Wayne]

If your main reason for bringing up CoCalc is because "I recommended to students who did not have a fast enough computer at home to use the cloud computing", then you may be interested in using VPython in Jupyter Notebooks served freel in your browser via the MyBinder system?

For a demo: Go to https://github.com/vpython/vpython-jupyter#sample-program and click on the `launch binder` badge you see. Wait for a half a minute or so as a session spins up. The list of demo notebooks should open. You can run the demo notebooks right there via the browser.

Depending on your computational demands, your students could upload their notebooks to running sessions and run them. The drawback is that the sessions time out after 10 minutes of inactivity. So let them know to save changes back to the local machine often. There is 'a safety' net via the toolbar that lets users save the notebook to the local machine even after the session times out but that is meant as more like a last resort. I'd be happy to discuss how to use 'safety net' more if this is a direction you'd like to pursue.

[Claudine Allen]

Thank you for the advice, I'll have a look at the MyBinder system :)

Since we are at it, if I have code suggestions for your some of your nice demo programs, where should I submit them? Here? A pull request on GitHub?

Thank you again,

Claudine