[Mesa-users] Grad stellar structure & evolution course

[Michael Zingale]

I agree that this would be awesome.  To be able to have an entire lesson in
a jupyter notebook and interact with MESA entirely through python wrappers
would really help with educational uses.

On Fri, Oct 6, 2017 at 11:32 AM, Sean M. Couch <couch at pa.msu.edu> wrote:

> I think the top of my wishlist, particularly for using MESA as a teaching
> tool, would be a Python/Jupyter notebook interface. We use a lot of Jupyter
> notebooks and Python in our instruction and it is very approachable for
> students new to programming/computation. An interface to MESA could provide
> utilities for changing inlists, running a pre-compiled MESA binary, and
> automagically plotting output in the notebook.
>
> Sean
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> ----------------------------------------------
> Sean M. Couch
> Assistant Professor
> Department of Physics and Astronomy
> Department of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering
> National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory/Facility for Rare Isotope
> Beams
> Michigan State University
> 567 Wilson Rd
> <https://maps.google.com/?q=567+Wilson+Rd&entry=gmail&source=g>, 3250 BPS
> East Lansing, MI  48824
> (517) 884-5035    ——    couch at pa.msu.edu    ——    www.pa.msu.edu/~couch
>
>
>
>
> On October 5, 2017 at 5:29:35 PM, Bill Paxton (paxton at kitp.ucsb.edu)
> wrote:
>
> It would be valuable to get some feedback from folks who have used mesa in
> courses about what might be done to make that easier and more valuable. In
> particular, what would stop you from using it in a course for students
> without programming experience? There’s a lot that can be done with mesa
> just by editing inlists and never looking at a line of code, let alone
> writing any.
>
> Is the command line interface a barrier to non-programming students? I
> imagine many of them have never used a command line interface! Would it
> help to have a simple GUI that replaced the terminal by a more familiar
> interface of buttons and text fields?
>
> Or is the initial installation and compilation a show stopper for students
> without programming background? What would be a useful workaround for that?
>
> What else? It’s time to generate a wish list. Feel free to endorse the
> worthy project of a new mesa-based textbook, but some of the current blocks
> to using mesa in the classroom might be solved more quickly than a new text
> can be created!
>
> Cheers,
> Bill
>
>


-- 
Michael Zingale
Associate Professor

Dept. of Physics & Astronomy • Stony Brook University • Stony Brook, NY
11794-3800
*phone*:  631-632-8225
*e-mail*: Michael.Zingale at stonybrook.edu
*web*: http://www.astro.sunysb.edu/mzingale
github: http://github.com/zingale
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