In the spring of 2020, Unidata made an offer of resources through the Science Gateway project in order to facilitate online learning in response to the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic. Since that time, nearly three hundred and fifty users — mostly undergraduates in atmospheric science programs — have been able to take advantage of cloud-based resources to access pre-configured computational notebooks for learning and teaching objectives.

For the fall 2020 term, Unidata is once again offering to provide universities (or individual instructors) access to cloud-based JupyterHub servers tailored to the needs of university atmospheric science courses and workshops. By using the Unidata Science Gateway, instructors can add Jupyter notebooks used in their coursework to a dedicated JupyterHub hosted using Unidata’s resources in the NSF Jetstream cloud. Once logged in to the JupyterHub, individual students access pre-configured computing environments that allow them to work with the notebooks interactively, making and saving their own alterations to existing notebooks or creating their own new notebooks.

Unidata’s Science Gateway can provide cloud-based JupyterHub servers tailored to the needs of university atmospheric science courses. Because many universities are responding to local public health mandates related to the COVID-19 epidemic by transitioning to the use of remote-learning techniques and online-only courses, Unidata is encouraging community members to evaluate whether this no-cost resource can benefit their students during the Spring term.

Faculty members in the U.S. Naval Academy (USNA) Oceanography Department are embarking upon a new voyage: to learn Python. The USNA Oceanography Department has traditionally used Matlab as the primary tool to analyze and visualize geosciences data. To build on that coding success and align with the efforts of the geosciences community, at the start of the spring 2020 semester, Associate Professor Bradford Barrett and Instructor Alexander Davies organized a “Python Book Club” in which faculty members meet once or twice a month to collaboratively learn Python. Because USNA is a small undergraduate-only institution with resource limitations and complex federal networking restrictions, Barrett (USNA’s UCAR Representative) and Davies (currently serving on the Unidata Users Committee) reached out to Unidata for help.

During the Fall semester of 2018, Notre Dame of Maryland University (NDMU) piloted a small seminar course in scientific computing intended for junior and senior undergraduates majoring in math, physics, engineering, or computer science. The goal was to develop and test a multi-disciplinary course, which would ultimately be added as an upper-level elective in these programs. Because NDMU is a small, primarily undergraduate, teaching university with limited computational resources, we reached out to Unidata to ask if we could test our new course using JupyterHub resources that are part of the Unidata Science Gateway. Having never offered this course before, we were uncertain the extent of the resources needed and the commitment needed to maintain and tweak those resources as the course progressed. Partnering with Unidata offered us a way to gain this expertise while getting access to the resources we needed for the class.