Tidy up tutorial solution notebooks and provide problem templates

[wallscheid]

• Some of the solution notebooks are not well readable. It seems that they partly contain debug column of figures or a bulk of number arrays floating around. There is still some room for improvement here to promote readability and a quick introduction to the topic.
• It would be nice to have a small mark down information sheet per tutorial summarizing the most important information (very short description of the adressed problems, used algorithms, maybe an overview of the sub-tasks within the notebook). The format of the mark down sheet should be standardized among all tutorials.
• And finally, please provide the task templates with gaps for the student inputs. Hence, for every notebook there should be two files like ex00_task_template.ipynb and ex00_solution.ipynb.
  • Question/remark: Is there maybe a straightforward way to automate the generation of the task template notebooks based on the solution notebooks (e.g. simplified / light nbgrader with Travis backend which erases parts of the solution code based on built-in keywords). Investing once the effort in order to automate this pipeline will be very convinient for future updates of the tasks.

[wkirgsn]

Generation of "emptied" solution files that act as templates is perfectly possible with nbgrader, just enclosing stuff that needs to be hidden with "### BEGIN SOLUTION" and "# END SOLUTION".

Not sure what happens with travis-generated content, though. I think it can be commited next to the solution files with a small script in travis, then we would have a travis commit after each of our commits

[Webbah]

Does the enclosing works also for markdown? If not, how do we mark solutions there?

[wkirgsn]

Ok this is the instruction list:

1. Install nbgrader with

   conda install jupyter
   conda install -c conda-forge nbgrader

   (do not use pip!)

2. Get the folder structure right, such that nbgrader can work:

   • exercises/
     • nbgrader_config.py # configuration
     • templates/ # destination for autogenerated templates
     • solutions/ # actual source code (solutions with markers)
     • ex1/
     • ex2/ ...

3. For each exercise solution notebook:

   • Open the notebook and click on View > Cell toolbar > Create Assignment
     • This enables assigning types and points to each cell
   • Mark task templates with "read-only", solution markdown with "manually graded answer", and solution code with "autograded answer", where solution lines are enclosed with ### BEGIN SOLUTION and ### END SOLUTION.

4. Generate the template from the solution with nbgrader generate_assignment "<<exercise name>>", e.g. nbgrader generate_assignment "ex01"

I can go ahead and start with point 2 but I will need assistance for point 3 and all exercises except 1 and 8. The generation of the templates (point 4) from the solutions can be outsourced to TravisCI as soon as we have 1-3 finished.

[wkirgsn]

all templates are generated and readmes were created.