Project Jupyter provides a broad collection of open-source tools for interactive computing that has become ubiquitous in data science and scientific computing, and is very popular in educational contexts.

Nbgrader, started by Jessica Hamrick in 2014, is an extension for creating notebook-based assignments, online courses, and for auto-grading these assignments. It is central to many Jupyter-based services used by teaching institutions.

As a large part of the Jupyter user base has adopted the JupyterLab frontend, most of the popular extensions to the classic notebook UI now have an equivalent in the JupyterLab world. Unfortunately, the nbgrader extension was still outstanding as it had not yet been ported to the JupyterLab extension system. Resolving this has become critical as it was recently decided in a Jupyter Enhancement Proposal (JEP) that the next major version of the Notebook package (v7) will be based on JupyterLab components, and will rely on the JupyterLab extension mechanism. As part of this JEP, it was decided that the release of Notebook 7 should be contingent on porting certain popular classic notebook extensions to JupyterLab, including nbgrader.

Upgrading nbgrader is an important step for the advancement of the Jupyter project!

Nbgrader 0.8

The port of nbgrader to JupyterLab is a longstanding request of the community. A lot of work had already been done on this front by contributors to the ngshare project (Kevin Rong, Abigail Almanza, Lawrence Lee, and Eric Li) who developed a large part of the JupyterLab-based UI, but did not finalize the migration due to lack of time. Fortunately, they made their work available to the community for others to complete the upgrade. This includes the development of the remaining elements of the UI, the adaptation of the server-side extension, and adding tests on the JupyterLab extensions to improve the CI. The nbgrader 0.8 release also includes other significant work items such as the upgrade to nbconvert 6, the switch from the notebook server to jupyter-server, and the adoption of the jupyter releaser.

Today, we are pleased to announce the release of nbgrader 0.8.0, the first release of the extension to support the JupyterLab frontend.

Creating an assignment

Teachers can create assignments directly in the notebook UI by setting the proper information for each cell, such as the cell type (whether it is a locked cell, a manually graded answer, or an automatically graded answer) and the number of points the answer is worth.

The UI for creating an assignment in the notebook (teachers).

Managing assignments on the teacher side

Formgrader is the part of the nbgrader UI for the teachers to manage the assignments.

From this UI, teachers will be able to:

• generate assignments from a Notebook file
• share assignments with students
• fetch assignments after student submission
• grade assignments
• provide feedback to students

The Formgrader UI to manage assignments (teachers).

Managing assignments on the student side

The assignments list UI is used by students to fetch assignments released by the teacher, submit their answers, and benefit from the feedback after the evaluation by teachers.

The assignments list UI to fetch and submit assignments (students).

What about the future?

Creating and grading assignments in nbgrader uses the metadata of individual notebook cells. The current release of nbgrader provides a widget to interact with the corresponding metadata.

As other extensions need a similar functionality, we are expanding the generic cell metadata editor to address this requirement in a more generic and pluggable way. The new metadata editor allows any extension to create a specific form to interact with the relevant part of the metadata, specified with a JSON schema and rendered with react-jsonschema-form.

Nbgrader could take advantage of this improvement in a future release.

Try it online

Installation

You can install the latest version of nbgrader using pip:

pip install nbgrader

The GitHub repository can be found here.

Acknowledgements

This work at QuantStack was partly funded by Université Paris Cité in the context of the PlasmaBio project.

We are grateful to Jessica Hamrick, Jeremy Tuloup, and Ian Stuart for their help and code reviews during the upgrade to nbgrader 0.8.0.

About the Author

Nicolas Brichet is a scientific software developer at QuantStack active in the Jupyter ecosystem. In the past few months, he has been working on the Nbgrader extension, as well as other developments in core JupyterLab such as an improved notebook metadata editor. Before joining QuantStack, Nicolas was a software engineer at INRAE.