make examples progressive

[WeatherGod]

In part 2, the example is too much to do at once. Rather, it would make sense to build up that example as more is taught. Perhaps a new feature for IPython notebooks would be useful (floating cells?)

[bkarlovitz]

Can you be more specific about what you mean here?

When I work through one of these examples, I call plt.show() line-by-line so I can see exactly what each step adds to the plot. Are you asking for something that naturally fits this workflow?

P.S. - I very much enjoyed this tutorial. Thank you for putting it together.

[WeatherGod]

When we did this particular version of the tutorial back in July 2015, going through part 2 took long enough that by the time we got to the end, attendees had forgotten some of the stuff we talked about at the beginning of Part 2. So, the obvious idea would be to break up the exercise into many small pieces spread throughout Part 2.

However, this got me thinking. In order for that to work one would have to have prepared examples (similar to what I have elsewhere in this tutorial). What gives me pause is that this progressive exercise depends upon the student having understood (or be familiar with) everything that exists in the prepared example. The best way to ensure that is that it comes from the students themselves, not the instructor (this is especially true if the exercise has some flexibility, such as choosing markers, titles, colors, etc.).

So, I am left with two ways to do this... have a single cell that we can jump to and from and update for each mini-exercise (and see how it updates the figure), or have some sort of "floating" ipython cell that follows us so that we don't have to keep scrolling up and down the screen to find the exercise. Another approach that I really dislike is to have some way of a cell to load the contents of a previous cell (perhaps automatically, but even manually triggered).

I am glad you enjoyed the tutorial!