Nicolas Poulain Capytale: a case of large scale use of jupyter notebooks in education | JupyterCon

Discover how Capytale, a large-scale educational platform, leverages Jupyter notebooks to engage 4 million users, including middle and high school students, with features such as centralized tracking and collaborative content sharing.

Key takeaways
  • Capital, an online platform for learning computer science, was adopted by French national education system for providing a large-scale educational computer science infrastructure.
  • Capital currently has 4 million registered users, but not all are active on the platform, offering a scalability with negligible costs and a handful of engineers.
  • It is used in middle schools and high schools in France, and there are plans to add new projects, such as games programming (Pygame) and Arduino for electronics.
  • Teachers and students can use Jupyter notebooks with Capytale, allowing them to log in and use notebooks on demand.
  • Capytale stores data in a centralized Drupal CMS, allowing teachers to track students’ progress and work.
  • There is no plan to promote teachers to share content; instead, teachers are naturally drawn to sharing and collaborating on teaching materials.
  • Teachers and students can create notebooks and add new content, including videos and links.
  • The system does not rely on creating individual user IDs and passwords; instead, each district has its own directory and authentication system.
  • Teachers can manage resources and students can create personal notebooks.
  • Capital will eventually become open-source.
  • It offers library sharing, simplified authentication and other features important for French educators.
  • Scalability was a major challenge, with many students sharing notebooks simultaneously; Jupyter notebooks were deployed to address this, allowing client-side execution.