Hi Francis,

That sounds like a good plan. I have a few comments on how you might do it:

It should be possible to install Firedrake as usual in a directory which is readable by the students. They should then be able to activate the venv and have Firedrake just work for them.
It's perfectly fine for the students to ask Firedrake questions via the usual channels. However students are often bad at distinguishing what is a Firedrake question and what is a question about the course. Please therefore ensure that you and any TAs are monitoring slack and the mailing list so that you can answer or redirect any queries that are actually about your material rather than Firedrake itself.
I have a fairly positive experience of using GitHub classroom for distributing and collecting exercises. You might want to consider using that. I'm happy to answer questions about this if you are interested.

Do let us know how you get on with this.

Regards,

David

Hello everyone,

In January I start teaching an introductory course in PDEs. I have taught this many times but this time I plan to have a weekly computer lab where the students can learn to run software (based on firedrake) and then write a lab report. I have a bunch of notebooks that I will give to them one at a time and get them to solve a variety of problems. Before I do I have a few questions.

I presume no one has a problem with this?
There are 40 some students registered in the class. I don't plan to get them to change the code except for parameters and maybe functions. But if students have questions they can go through the usual channels to ask questions, i.e. email and slack?
I know that it is good practice for each firedraker to install their own code but I am going to install it on a server and let them use it, since it will be so much easier for them. If you have any warning as to what might go wrong please let me know.
If it would be helpful to advertise somewhere that I am using firedrake in a course, please let me know how.

Cheers, Francis

------------------
Francis Poulin

Associate Dean, Undergraduate Studies
Associate Professor
Department of Applied Mathematics
University of Waterloo

email:           fpoulin@uwaterloo.ca
Web:            https://uwaterloo.ca/poulin-research-group/
Telephone: +1 519 888 4567 x32637