Teaching chemical engineering using Jupyter notebook: Problem generators and lecturing tools

Abstract

The primary objective of this study is to develop teaching materials for chemical engineering students (or students pursuing other related B.Sc./M.Sc. degrees) that encourage self-learning to facilitate understanding and the development of problem-solving skills. Tools are oriented to support the teaching of “Introduction to Chemical Engineering” courses to 1st year B.Sc. students in Chemical Engineering, 2nd year B.Sc. students in Chemistry, and 3rd year B.Sc. students in Biochemistry at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM). Problem generators of standard exercises, as an additional complement to the exercises that are used in the lectures, seminars, and assignments to facilitate the learning of the students, have been developed. These generators provide exercises to students with “unlimited” initial values (with certain restrictions). The software that was used to develop these materials was Jupyter Notebook, which runs under the Python 3.6 language. The problem generators can be classified into fixed problem generators, case-based generators, and random problem generators. Additionally, lecturing tools have been developed to support teaching using live/interactive examples. These examples can learning understanding of various topics of the courses.