adding a SageMath kernel?

[mmosmond]

Hi there,

I'm teaching EEB430, a course on mathematical modeling in biology, which has a computer lab component. I have been using SageMath for the labs, as it is a great language for doing symbolic math and it is free to use (a nice bonus especially when the students are working remotely).

I was hosting these labs as Jupyter Notebooks via mybinder.org, but sometime in September this stopped working (see jupyterhub/binderhub#1409). There are a few workarounds (downloading SageMath locally or using cocalc.com), but they have downsides (complicated and slow, respectively).

So I was wondering, would it be possible to add a SageMath kernel to UofT's JupyterHub?

Thanks,
Matt

[choldgraf]

Hey @mmosmond - sorry for the slow response. We are not monitoring the issues in this repository closely (and instead prefer people email support@2i2c.org for support questions).

I do think it is possible to set up SageMath on a JupyterHub, though it might take some fiddling to get it to work and I'm not sure if we have the bandwidth to do this mid-semester. Is there a chance that you need this in the Spring semester instead of right now?

More generally, the issue with Binder and sagemath has been discussed in a few other places - here's one community forum thread about it: https://discourse.jupyter.org/t/binder-and-sagemath/11059 and it looks from here like there is a workaround: https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/GCOg8oT3beI?pli=1 (not sure if this is exactly your issue, but thought I'd note in case it's helpful!)

[mmosmond]

Hey @choldgraf - thanks for the message.

I do think it is possible to set up SageMath on a JupyterHub, though it might take some fiddling to get it to work and I'm not sure if we have the bandwidth to do this mid-semester. Is there a chance that you need this in the Spring semester instead of right now?

I have some workarounds for this semester. I'll teach this course again Fall 2022, so perhaps there would be time to get it up and running by then?

More generally, the issue with Binder and sagemath has been discussed in a few other places - here's one community forum thread about it: https://discourse.jupyter.org/t/binder-and-sagemath/11059 and it looks from here like there is a workaround: https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/GCOg8oT3beI?pli=1 (not sure if this is exactly your issue, but thought I'd note in case it's helpful!)

Thanks, yeah I saw those and have implemented that solution now. I'm thinking UofTs JupyterHub would be better than either cocalc.com or binder since it would be faster than cocalc and allow students to save their work. So I'd be keen to try this option in Fall 2022 if possible.

Thanks again for your response -- I'll email for future issues.

Matt