1. Answering Science Questions With Jupyter Notebooks
Jeff Gaw
Mary Institute and Country Day School
101 North Warson Rd
St. Louis, MO 63124

2. MICDS Science 9 Accelerated
Math Intensive
MICDS Science 9 Accelerated
Most scientists have had to learn to code to do their job
Some only know how to make Excel to what they want
Others write complex applications to model some physical process they are studying
And others write complex code to understand the data they collect
We wanted our students to understand and appreciate the role computer programing plays with real scientists
Programming is done to do science!
Sci9 Accelerated used Jupyter Notebooks to step our students through this type of coding.

3. Jupyter Notebooks Web-based interactive computing environment
Series of interconnected narrative text blocks (LaTex) and coding blocks.
Variables and data from one coding block are available to later coding blocks.
Makes it ideal for stepping a student through a process.
Can display pictures
Can make and display graphs using matplotlib
Narrative Text
(instructions)
Python Code
Narrative Text
(instructions)
Python Code

4. How we started (with the Big Bang)…
How big is BIG?
Students wrote code to convert numbers from one representation to another (mimicking how they use their calculator). Eventually, they wrote code to scale AUs to the size of things in our classroom.
How SMALL is small?
As we studied the Standard Model and the Big Bang, we used this notebook to try to understand how small things can really get.
Explosions
In studying the Big Bang, we needed students to understand what happens to objects that explode. This notebook investigates what happens.
Hubble Diagram
This notebook leads students through an exercise using recent astronomical data to determine the age of the universe.

5. Additional Notebooks ….
Analyzing STEM building data Part 1
Analyzing STEM building data Part 2
Looked for trends in a three weeks worth of data (recorded every 15 mins) for the
amount of electricity generated from the PV cells on top of this building
amount of electricity used by the building
used matplotlib for graphing
Bohr Energy Equation Part 1
Bohr Energy Equation Part 2
Computed and displayed the emission spectra for the user requested one electron ion for any of the first five elements of the periodic table.

6. AP Physics
Use VPython in GlowScript ( A web-based IDE that gets around the issues of using the older Python 2.7 required for VPython.
Student projects included modeling free fall and projectile motion with correct physics.
Students model 3D electric fields in the E&M portion of the AP Physics course

7. Which would you like to try?