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Building CyberLiteracy Through Interactive Lessons: Design, Development, and Deployment of Jupyter Notebooks for Geospatial Computing Education
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  • Forrest Bowlick,
  • Eric Shook,
  • Karen Kemp,
  • Anand Padmanabhan
Forrest Bowlick
University of Massachusetts - Amherst

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Eric Shook
University of Minnesota
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Karen Kemp
University of Southern California
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Anand Padmanabhan
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
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Abstract

Across geospatial domains and practices, there is a pressing educational need for engagement with and understanding of computational and technical advancements relevant to geospatial work. Computational skills and practices, like working with big data, creation and management of machine learning algorithms, work with automation in data analysis and management, and many others, are growing as fundamentals to conducting geospatial scientific research, and to learning in the geospatial classroom. The Hour of CyberInfrastructure (Hour of CI) project aims to create learning materials for use in diverse learning contexts to provide learners a base to build their practice in eight core areas of cyber literacy pertinent to geographic information science (GIS) and geospatial practice. Leveraging the affordances of Jupyter notebooks and cloud computing, we discuss the design, development, and deployment of introductory lessons in these areas. We report the educational design strategies behind development of these lessons, discuss the technical development and support required to use these in an interactive Jupyter notebook enabled space, and report on the deployment of these lessons in initial classroom testing environments. By sharing components of the entire process in developing Hour of CI lessons, we aim to outline our experiences, share best practices and pitfalls, and consider feedback from initial testing. These results will support other efforts in computer-based STEM education by providing feedback and results from an interwoven, cross-discipline geospatial, GIS, and computer science context.