A Jupyter Workshop in Education at Paris Saclay (Jupyter Workshops 2025 call) #47
Description
Hello everybody,
as discussed with @KirstieJane I'm opening this issue to track the proposition we (at Paris Saclay University) would like to submit to the Jupyter Workshops call.
Preliminary plan
- Day 1 - Use cases in teaching: recurring problems. Presentations in the morning and “sprints” in the afternoon, i.e., working on specific courses with mystmd maintainers... this type of work always leads to pull requests on the docs.... 🙂
- Day 2 - presentation of the ecosystem (don't be afraid of going technical) by the maintainers in the morning, brainstorming in the afternoon on how to solve some problems intrinsic to the tool (I am thinking localisation, really important in Europe, and easier style customization and templating).
- Day 3 - mystmd as an exchange format for notebooks (see Markdown based notebooks jupyter/enhancement-proposals#103), status of the format, possible advances, possible implementations.
Concluding remarks: actions that could be funded via https://jupyterfoundation.org/community-funding-proposals/ (the next year one... :))
Submission Form
Workshop Name
Demistify myst Markdown in education
Describe the goal/topic of the workshop in 1-3 sentences:
The goal of this workshop is to remove barriers for science educators in their adoption of Jupyter Book and the MyST document engine.
MySTMD - part of Jupyter Book, an official sub-project of the Jupyter ecosystem - provides an opportunity to improve the accessibility and replicability of new and existing pedagogical contents.
Attendees will leave knowing how they can contribute to the Jupyter Book community, collaborate effectively with maintainers, and advocate for their users’ needs: improving and strengthening the community for all.
How does the workshop involve strategic work related to Project Jupyter?
A standard integration of MySTMD in a Jupyter-powered computational environment is still missing, but essential for the integration of notebooks in a scientific workflow (see jupyter/enhancement-proposals#4).
While Jupyter Lab MyST allows executed code to be rendered in markdown notebook cells, markdown based Jupyter Lab notebooks may have different formats.
At this time they can be imported in Jupyter Lab using jupytext a python tool, which need to be installed and configured independently.
This may lead to inconsistencies in the display and execution of the MyST based noteboks (see for example mwouts/jupytext#1379, mwouts/jupytext#1371, mwouts/jupytext#1396).
Teachers hoping to manage execution and publishing with a single tool may feel overwhelmed by the number of dependencies and potential setup and installation issues.
During the workshop we plan to move forward ongoing discussions regarding enhancements to markdown based notebooks:
- JEP: official support for Markdown-based notebooks jupyter/enhancement-proposals#102
- Markdown based notebooks jupyter/enhancement-proposals#103
The lack of internationalisation in the MySTMD engine is also an obstacle to its wider adoption (see eg jupyter-book/mystmd#166 and https://github.com/orgs/jupyter-book/discussions/1917).
As an outcome of the workshop is that we plan to produce a roadmap for internationalisation to be discussed with Jupyter Book community and eventually transformed into a community funding proposal.
How will this event grow the size and/or health of the Jupyter contributor community, including underserved or underrepresented contributors?
MySTMD and its Jupyter Book 2.0 deployment represents a powerful opportunity for accessibility in scientific education.
We contacted some of the maintainers of the project, who accepted our invitation to the workshop: we will continue to collaborate with them to improve the on-boarding experience for new contributors (in line with the organisation goals expressed here #19).
Use-case and technical presentations will be followed each day by contribution sprints and collaborative brainstorming.
We hope this workshop will enhance non English-speaking teachers adoption, providing a roadmap for the internationalisation of the tool.
Approximate Event Date
3 days on February 2026
Proposed Venue
Paris Saclay University.
The University offers a number of possible venues for small workshops, all equipped with remote connection tools.