This is interesting. I’ve been tinkering with using Jupyter Notebooks for our somewhat intensive onboarding of new engineers. Is Pathbird solely focused on the education market? Is there pricing info anywhere?
The original version of it was developed while teaching a data science course for non-CS grad students at the University of Michigan so most of our early efforts has been focused on the education market. My co-founder/advisor/UMich-professor has been using it to teach some courses outside UMich as well (namely https://pathbird.com/compml which is a very high quality math-focused DS course), so there's some precedent for it. If you're so inclined, feel free to shoot me an email (travis at pathbird.com) and I'd be happy to discuss things.
Pathbird looks really interesting. I am trying to understand what the main product is. One can design a curriculum and the lesson content is hosted in a Jupyter Notebook? If you were designing a course to teach a language, that language would have to be supported by Jupyter?
It’s not the Jupyter notebook (or lab) frontend, it’s a custom webapp built for learning and specifically around exercise based, guided learning. So a student will go through exercises (mostly multiple choice and code-based “autograded” exercises) to check their understanding and guide them through a lesson.
This style of learning tends to work best with interactive languages (Julia and Python and R at present). Theoretically we could support other languages with Jupyter kernels (including Go and C++, etc) as well. I wonder how well those languages would work in this context considering it’s a bit hard to be “iterative” with those (but consider than a challenge rather than a limitation!).
Feel free to reach out with any questions/comments/concerns and I can answer in more long form!