Python Teaching Code

Teaching notebooks for the Brainard Lab. Every notebook can be run in the browser with Google Colab — no local install required.

Run a notebook in Colab

Any notebook in this repo opens in Colab through a URL of this form:

https://colab.research.google.com/github/BrainardLab/PythonTeachingCode/blob/main/<path-to-notebook>.ipynb

Or browse interactively: open https://colab.research.google.com, choose GitHub, enter BrainardLab/PythonTeachingCode, and pick a notebook.

Colab gives each session a fresh, temporary machine. Changes are not saved back to GitHub. To keep your edits use File → Save a copy in Drive, or File → Download → .ipynb.

Notebooks

Lecture 3.2

Notebooks in notebooks/key/lecture_3.2/:

Notebook	Open in Colab
lecture_3.2_Group_A.ipynb — in-class predict-then-plot, pooled Group A height game
StockChangeDistribution.ipynb — daily S&P 500 moves (fat tails)
HeightDistribution.ipynb — adult women's height, NHANES (nicely normal)
CityPopulationDistribution.ipynb — US city sizes, raw and log10 (lognormal)

StockChangeDistribution, HeightDistribution, and CityPopulationDistribution each compare a real data set against a normal distribution using the same plots and summary table. The shared code lives in notebooks/key/lecture_3.2/dist_tools.py; each notebook only loads its data, wraps it in a dist_tools.Distribution, and calls dist_tools.analyze(). Edit dist_tools.py once and all three notebooks change together. Each notebook downloads dist_tools.py from GitHub at run time when it isn't already present, so Colab works with no extra steps. tools/build_notebooks.py regenerates the three notebooks' shared scaffolding.

Adding a new notebook

1. Put the .ipynb file anywhere under notebooks/.

2. Run python tools/add_colab_badge.py to insert an "Open in Colab" badge as the first cell (idempotent — safe to re-run on every notebook; it recurses into subfolders).

3. Add a row to a table above.

4. Commit and push:

   git add notebooks/ README.md
   git commit -m "Add your_notebook"
   git push

The pushed notebook is immediately runnable in Colab via its badge link.

Running locally (optional)

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
jupyter lab