Building CyberLiteracy Through Interactive Lessons: Design, Development,
and Deployment of Jupyter Notebooks for Geospatial Computing Education
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.