Ecosyste.ms: Awesome

An open API service indexing awesome lists of open source software.

Awesome Lists | Featured Topics | Projects

https://github.com/hnarayanan/thinkbot-xblock

A collection of edX XBlock components for numerical simulations.
https://github.com/hnarayanan/thinkbot-xblock

educational fenics javascript mechanics python simulation

Last synced: 14 days ago
JSON representation

A collection of edX XBlock components for numerical simulations.

Awesome Lists containing this project

README

        

XBlock components for numerical simulation
==========================================

Copyright (C) 2013 Harish Narayanan

This project is released under the GNU Affero General Public
License. Please read LICENSE.txt for the complete terms.

Background
----------

This project aims to create a collection of XBlocks that allow
students to carry out simulations in mathematical physics and
instructors to pose exercises within this context. It does this by
connecting to [thinkbot](http://thinkbot.net/), a computing service
which offers a selection of scientific computing software through a
[RESTful
API](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer).

In particular, the project initially aims to build three kinds of
XBlock components:

1. A component that allows students to interact with the results of a
precomputed numerical solution. Such demonstrations are used to
motivate the theoretical material covered in classes.

2. A component that allows students to dynamically interact in simple
ways with a numerical simulation, such as changing parameters.

3. A component that presents students with interactive programming
exercises tied to computational science.

![Interacting with the solution of a PDE](http://harishnarayanan.org/files/images/tmp/thinkbot-xblock-1.png)

Installation
------------

1. Install the [XBlock component
architecture](https://github.com/edX/XBlock) project

2. Source the corresponding `venv`, if you installed it in a virtual
environment (which you should have!)

3. Install the thinkbot related Xblocks from this project's root
folder:

$ pip install -e thinkbot

4. Run the Django development server for the XBlock workbench:

$ python manage.py runserver

5. Open a web browser to: http://127.0.0.1:8000 and find a link to
the thinkbot XBlock

Contact info
------------

If you're interested in finding out more about how to use this project
in your own course or are interested in contributing to it, please
write to me:

Harish Narayanan