Capytale: a case of large-scale use of jupyter notebooks in education
The Capytale project, developed by the "Académie de Paris" (the Paris school district) and the help of the "Académie d'Orléans-Tours" is an online education platform for teaching the basics of programming to high schoolers.
Capytale provides several web-based interfaces well suited for the various use cases of the high-school curriculum, one of which is the Jupyter notebook.
Now adopted by most school districts in the country, the notebook service provided by Capytale serves over 80,000 users per week.
The deployment model of Capytale, built upon Pyodide and the Jupyter notebook user interface, proved remarkably reliable and scalable, allowing tens of thousands of concurrent user sessions with small hosting requirements.
In this presentation, we detail the technical constraints and pedagogical motivations that lead to this specific design and discuss ongoing and future improvements to the platform.