gems-uff / noworkflow

Supporting infrastructure to run scientific experiments without a scientific workflow management system.
http://gems-uff.github.io/noworkflow
MIT License
119 stars 28 forks source link

Use noWorkflow for education #68

Open JoaoFelipe opened 8 years ago

JoaoFelipe commented 8 years ago

The provenance captured by noWorkflow could be used for education.

Since it helps understanding what happened during the execution of a script, it is possible to use noWorkflow for teaching and learning Python. With this purpose, it would be nice to have better activation graphs, showing parameters, returns and all activations explicitly (i.e. without summarizations). I worked on something in this direction with @henriquebastos, but we used Python decorators to collect calls, instead of noWorkflow: https://gist.github.com/henriquebastos/a28ef88f12d98a410df9

There are other possible uses for noWorkflow in education. It could be used for homework answer checking and validation. Instead of submitting the final script as an answer to a homework assignment, a student could submit the provenance of a trial, captured by noWorkflow. Then, the professor could use it to:

The student could also use the provenance as a "proof" that the script worked on her machine.

A third use case for noWorkflow in education could be asking help. It could be possible to publish a provenance page in a website. When a person wanted to ask "X is not working as expected, what is the reason?" (in sites such stackoverflow, or class groups), instead of just asking and presenting the code, she could send the provenance page link to give more context.

JoaoFelipe commented 8 years ago

Other possible features for education: