[BLOG] Add a-step-towards-educating-with-spyder (#518)

Co-authored-by: Noa Tamir <[email protected]>

Author: MarsBarLee

apps/labs/posts/a-step-towards-educating-with-spyder.md

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+---
+title: 'A step towards educating with Spyder'
+published: April 11, 2021
+author: juanita-gomez
+description: 'As a community manager in the Spyder team, I have been looking for ways of involving more users in the community and making Spyder useful for a larger number of people. With this, a new idea came: Education. For the past months, we have been wondering with the team whether Spyder could also serve as a teaching-learning platform, especially in this era where remote instruction has become necessary.'
+category: [Community, IDEs]
+featuredImage:
+  src: /posts/a-step-towards-educating-with-spyder/blog_feature_var2.svg
+  alt:  'An illustration of a brown and white hand coming towards each other to pass a business card with the logo of Quansight Labs.'
+hero:
+  imageSrc: /posts/a-step-towards-educating-with-spyder/blog_hero_var1.svg
+  imageAlt: 'An illustration of a brown hand holding up a microphone, with some graphical elements highlighting the top of the microphone.'
+---
+
+
+As a community manager in the Spyder team, I have been looking for ways of
+involving more users in the community and making Spyder useful for a larger
+number of people. With this, a new idea came: Education.
+
+For the past months, we have been wondering with the team whether Spyder
+could also serve as a teaching-learning platform, especially in this era
+where remote instruction has become necessary. We submitted a proposal to the
+Essential Open Source Software for Science (EOSS) program of the Chan
+Zuckerberg Initiative, during its third cycle, with the idea of providing a
+simple way inside Spyder to create and share interactive tutorials on topics
+relevant to scientific research. Unfortunately, we didn’t get this funding,
+but we didn’t let this great idea die.
+
+We submitted a second proposal to the [Python Software Foundation](https://www.python.org/psf/)
+from which we were awarded $4000. For me, this is the perfect opportunity for
+us to take the first step towards using Spyder for education.
+
+## What the project is about
+
+The goal of this project is to create specialized Python online training
+content that uses Spyder as the main platform to deliver it. The grant will
+cover the development of three practical workshops:
+
+1. Python for Financial Data Analysis with Spyder
+2. Python for Scientific Computing and Visualization with Spyder
+3. Spyder 5 Plugin Development
+
+They will be included as part of [Spyder’s documentation](https://docs.spyder-ide.org/current/index.html)
+for remote learning, but they will also be used as hands-on materials for talks and workshops.
+
+These materials are meant for users to learn how Spyder can accelerate their
+workflow when working with Python in scientific research and data analysis.
+The idea is for us to provide a way in which we can help people get the most
+out of Spyder by applying it in their day-to-day jobs.
+
+The first two workshops will cover aspects such as data exploration and
+visualization with Spyder’s variable explorer and plots panes, getting
+documentation through Spyder’s help pane, writing good quality and efficient
+code using Spyder’s code analysis and profiler, etc.
+
+Our last workshop will demonstrate how to create a plugin for Spyder, which,
+thanks to our new API in [Spyder 5](https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder/releases/tag/v5.0.0),
+released in April 2021, will allow users to easily customize and
+extend Spyder’s interface with new menus, toolbars, widgets or panes in order
+to adapt it to their own needs...
+
+## Why it is important
+
+This project will benefit the international community of Spyder users
+(around 500,000, we estimate) to discover new capabilities of Spyder in order
+to take advantage of all its resources. It will also provide testing
+materials for potential users who will be able to adopt Spyder as a tool for
+their work in Financial Data Analysis, Scientific research and Spyder plugin
+development.
+
+For the past months, our [documentation tutorials](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPonohdiDqg9epClEcXoAPUiK0pN5eRoc)
+have had a great impact in our community, with more than 20,000 views in our
+YouTube channel. We expect these workshops to be a great input to our
+documentation and help us continue building a community around Spyder.
+
+## What is next?
+
+This project is just the first step towards making Spyder an educational
+tool. In the future, we hope that we can develop the infrastructure necessary
+to support in-IDE tutorials, by improving the tools like [Jupyter Book](https://github.com/executablebooks/jupyter-book),
+[sphinx-thebe](https://github.com/executablebooks/sphinx-thebe), [MyST-Parser](https://github.com/executablebooks/MyST-Parser)
+which will provide better integration to write educational tutorials.
+
+The final goal is to enable researchers, educators and experts that don’t
+necessarily have a software engineering background to build scientific
+programming tutorials easily and provide them as online learning materials
+in Spyder. Once the infrastructure is built, we can develop several examples
+to demonstrate Spyder capabilities and teach basic scientific programming
+concepts applicable to a variety of fields.